“Still the best comic-book movie I know” (David Bordwell). Oshima’s only anime, Band of Ninja shows, as does Shiro Amakusa, that Oshima could employ almost any form or genre to his own ends. Choosing a favourite comic strip of Sixties students and radicals, Sanpei Shirato’s Ninja Bugeicho, which centres on a boy’s revenge for the death of his feudal lord father and his alliance with a renegade ninja leading a peasant rebellion, Oshima does something radical: instead of animating it in the usual fashion, he employs his camera to move over actual comic book pages to give them life and movement, adding voices, narration, and sound effects. Densely told, compressing many hours of narrative into less than two (and we warn that the English narration offers only a cursory account of the convoluted plot!), Band of Ninja offers a square-jawed, hunky hero with major hair, and surrounds him with some of Oshima’s strongest female characters, including a pregnant warrior and a “lady bandit.”