Fist of the North Star, Vol. 1

As a nice bonus, you get a few extra episodes on this disc (compared to the previous 4). Still, one thing left me scratching my head..this isn't the end,not by a long shot! Yes I did check...Kenshiro still has a few more fights in him, but its up to Manga Ent to acquire the rights and put out the rest (quickly, let's hope).

Back to the DVD..audio and video are satisfactory. Obviously I recommend the Japanese language track with subs (hey, its the way it was meant to be!) Just sit back, relax and watch the Ken dispatch foe after foe with skill and the line "You are already dead". You won't regret it.

The fights are alright, but the juice of the episodes are the kills. Every episode has these weird deaths like "exploding fingers" or "your dead in 7 seconds from my fingers in your neck". Stuff like that happens.

The problem with these episodes is animation. There is only, mabye 2 scenes you can consider fights. Almost every other death is by some weird killing move that lasts a few seconds but requires 2 clips of animation. Then, instead of showing the actual guys fall apart, they make the screen all bright and you see the shadow of the guys go all squishy and fall apart. Not cool.

On top of that. There is so little animation that it is a little infuriating. It almost feels like the creators tried to use one frame at least twice. I remember seeing 6 cars speeding through a city. 2 cars sped across followed by 4 others. The 4 other cars were just clones of the first 2. You could clearly see the exact same people go across the screen 3 times. As I said earlier, the fights all involve one or 2 moves. A frame is one little shot of the characters. I'd say it takes about 5 frames for a character in Dragonball Z to punch someone slowly. There may be 10 different frames tops to one fight in this anime. It is almost pathetic.

Normally I don't have high expectations. I'm satisfied by even the lowest animation if there is a story or something interesting. I remember seeing tons of old animes that had bad animation but still kept my interest. This seriously though has to be some of the worst use of animating I have ever seen. If Ken wasn't so awesomely cool I would of given this DVD 1 star.