Wen 丨 Lucifer
On the fourth day of December in Meiji 4, Kawakami Yansai, known as one of the "Four Great Beheadings of the Shogunate", was beheaded near the Nihonbashi In Tokyo, ending his legendary life.
Compared with the other three "human slashes", Kawakami Yansai is actually not famous, and the only well-known figures who can be confirmed to have died under his sword are only one of the Matsumoto clan clans, Sakuma Elephant Mountain; however, behind him, his image was constantly processed and romanticized by popular culture, until it became popular in East Asian cultural circles with the popularity of "The Sword Heart of Ronin" by Nobuhiro Kazuki.
The Heart of the Ranger Sword: Remembrance (1996)
Historically, Saihiko Kawakami was only five feet tall, which was only about one point and five meters in the metric system, and with a fair complexion, it was easy to be mistaken for a woman.
These details are also preserved in the setting of "Ranger Sword Heart". When kaoru Kamiya, the heroine of the manga, first developed a crush on Kenshin, her subjective perspective was pale and weak, without the aggression of a samurai or an adult male.
Although according to the story, it is already ten years of Meiji at this time, and at the end of the curtain, he has drawn his sword to kill people, and his age is supposedly much older than Kamiya Kaoru, but in appearance he still incredibly maintains the image of a juvenile beautiful teenager.
From this point of view, the final chapter of the live-action version of "Langke Sword Heart" shot by Netflix - "Remembrance", then the most abrupt to the audience is probably the voice of the protagonist Ken Sato first: The first live-action version of "Langke Sword Heart" was filmed ten years ago, when Ken Sato, nicknamed "Sugar", was only twenty-two years old, handsome with a young man's ignorance, which was the sword heart "hand-picked" by the original author and Tsuki Nobuhiro.
At that time, Ken Sato's voice was suitable for the sword heart of the Meiji decade. As a prequel, "Memories" was filmed ten years later, and although Sato's fitness hands were as strong as ever, there was no magical technique that could prevent his voice from becoming low and thick.
"The Heart of the Wandering Sword, The Final Chapter: Remembrance" (2021)
When Netflix announced the cast of the live-action version of "Memories", public opinion focused on the actress Sheridaiba played by Jun Muraji, and skeptics criticized the appearance and temperament of "Village Flower" for not being the best candidate for "Bai Meixiang".
However, the first is hearing, not vision, and it is Ken Sato, not Jun Arimura, which hints at the distance between the live-action version of "Remembrance" and the legendary OVA from 1999.
Speaking of the voice in the anime version of "Ranger Sword Heart" directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi, it is impossible not to mention the legendary voice actor who voiced the protagonist Sword Heart - Ryofumi Masayoshi. Prior to the anime version, "Ranger Kenshin" had already launched a radio drama version, and the kenshin in the radio drama was originally voiced by well-known voice actress Emi Ogata.
Even today's Japanese anime audiences are no strangers to Emi Ogata — shinji Tsurugi, the protagonist of Evangelion, is voiced by her, and her voice is more hoarse than that of the average woman, which is suitable for the teenage characters in the voice change period.
The anime version unexpectedly replaced Emi Ogata and invited Masayoshi Ryofumi, who had no previous dubbing experience, to voice Kenshin, which caused a lot of controversy among Kenshin fans.
However, Cool Breeze Is Not a Nameless Person. Before stepping into the voice actor world, Ryofu Masayoshi was the TOP male servant of the famous "Takarazuka" troupe. As we all know, the actors of the "Takarazuka" troupe are all unmarried women, and the male characters on the "Takarazuka" stage are also reversed by women, and the "male servants" who play male roles must maintain masculine behavior not only on the stage, but also in life.
As a top spot in the world, the thick voice line simulation of "juvenile tone" is a hand-to-hand thing for The Cool Breeze Makoto. After the broadcast of the animated version of "Langke Sword Heart", the neutral voice of the cool breeze was sometimes gentle and sometimes high and cold, which perfectly interpreted the image of the sword heart and completely dispelled the previous concerns of the animation audience.
Cool breeze is really worldly
In the OVA of "Remembrance", the sword heart at this time has just become a master, swinging his sword in the chaotic world, and for the sake of restoration, he will not hesitate to dye his hands with blood, known as "the executioner pulls out the sword". From time to time, the emotions of The Cool Breeze Masayoshi switch freely between the coldness of "human chop" and the confusion of youth, earning the tears of an unknown number of viewers, which is exactly what Ken Sato's version of the real-life "Remembrance" is difficult to pursue.
Why is it that the neutral voice of Liang Feng Zhenshi, which is neither atypical male nor atypical, is the sword heart, at least the inseparable standard of the sword heart in "Remembrance", this is because the essence of "Remembrance" is a perfect pure love tragedy:
Sword Heart killed Shedaipa's husband, and the distraught Shedaipa was instructed by the shogunate to come to Kenshin's side, waiting for the opportunity to discover the weakness of the strongest swordsman of the Restoration School, in the process she could not help but fall in love with Sword Heart, and her loyalty to her fiancé and love for Sword Heart made Shedaiba embarrassed.
However, the shogunate originally wanted to use her to shake the mind of the sword heart, so she would fall in love with the sword heart and was already in the shogunate's plan. In the end, in order to protect Kenshin, Shedaiba was assassinated by Kenshin with the shogunate killer, and when she died, she left a scar on Kenshin's left cheek, intertwined with another scar left on Kenshin's face by her fiancé.
If this story is not placed at the end of the curtain of bloody rain and grass and human life, I don't know how many viewers' big teeth will be acidized. Sword Heart is a character with perfect masculinity, Shedaiba is a character with perfect femininity, and the love between two overly perfect characters will not be abrupt only if placed in an extremely cruel environment.
Perfect femininity is easy to understand, Shedaiba is a typical "Yamato Fuzi", smiling without showing teeth, not overstepping, and being chaste and strong in heart, but still having a lot of courtesy when facing her husband and enemy - even in the anime, there are few such weak and passive female characters, the question is what is perfect masculinity?
The sword heart in "Remembrance" is as strong as an adult man on the one hand, and as gentle and pure as a virgin on the other hand. Katsura Kogoro, the guide of the sword heart in the animated version, said: The one who wields the sword to kill is the real sword heart, and the one who maintains purity is the ideal self in the sword heart. More importantly, what fascinates Shedaipa is this temperament of both sexes.
In front of the sword heart, she wanted to stop talking, and in the room she secretly wept: "Why are you so gentle when you don't kill people?" The two are just like the "male servants" and "female servants" on the "Takarazuka" stage, so it is no accident that Furuhashi Kazuhiro asked the top "male servants" who retired from the group to voice Yukidaiba.
It is worth mentioning that the "male servant" roles on the Takarazuka stage are not the imitation of the male characters of the actors with the biological sex of the female sex, but a new type of gender temperament created by the mixing of male and female temperaments.
Laura Murvie writes in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: "The (male) audience is obsessed with the male figure of the same kind and controls and possesses the women in the story world through this male figure." The appearance of the image of "male servant" inverts this male-dominated desire.
More than 90% of the audience of Takarazuka dramas are women, and by gazing at these beautiful juvenile forms that have been created and processed and are no longer aggressive, female audiences break the shackles imposed on themselves by the traditional gender division of labor in society, and realize the imaginative empowerment of women who were originally in the position of being gazed.
The gender-ambiguous sword heart and the overly feminine Shedaipa both remind the audience that the dualistic gender temperament in reality is essentially a "mask". In Japan, where machismo is rife, this is of even more practical significance.
In fact, although the original work of "Ranger Sword Heart" was serialized in "Shonen JUMP", it is not a typical hot-blooded juvenile manga.
The protagonist does not follow the story mode of fighting monsters and escalating, the theme of the story is to use bloodless violence to stop real violence, even the irregular storyboarding method of Nobuhiro Tsuki is more common in girl comics but rarely seen in the juvenile comics of the same period, from the source, "Langke Sword Heart" is a work with a vague gender temperament.
In the OVA version of "Memories", there is a bed scene between Kenshin and Ba, which is a rare plot in anime for teenagers. But the shooting is very beautiful, even abstinence.
It is very easy to understand the OVA version as a "Takarazuka" drama: "Takarazuka" is a dissolution of the concept of male superiority and female inferiority in Japanese society, but this dissolution is covered by the conservative aesthetic dogma of "pure and beautiful", which leads to the "cleanliness" in another direction.
Then we look back at the live-action version of "Remembrance" And its biggest unsatisfactory may be that the two main actors lack both a chuchu and touching and gender-ambiguous temperament: Ken Sato is already a mature male in the play, no longer has that fragile sense of youth; Jun Muraji is good at the role of the little sister next door (it is better to say that most of today's new generation of Japanese actresses are of this type), nor does it have the extreme "Yamato Fuzi" feeling of Yukidaiba.
The natural lack of temperament of the two actors is the biggest shortcoming of the film, just like letting the average actor and actress remake the "Takarazuka" drama, no matter how good it is, it is not that meaning, which cannot be made up by any technical means.
In the live-action version, there is also a beautiful teenager whose role has been greatly enhanced, that is, kenshin's nemesis: Okita Soji of the new group. In folklore, the commander is also a dancing teenager, and the film carefully restores the scene of this talented swordsman suffering from tuberculosis coughing up blood while fighting, and even restores the famous "nameless three-stage protrusion". But this image may not please the audience.
Because the crew also faithfully restored his "moon generation head".
Don't be serious in strange places!