Fist of the North Star. A true anime gem.
Me and anime have had a love affair for over 14 years now. I have grown with mainstream anime since my high school days. I recall every morning around 7a.m , I'd subjugate myself to Pokemon while stuffing my face with microwavable breakfast. Pokemon of course was quickly and permanently replaced by Digimon. Soon, I was on a consistent diet of shows like Escaflowne, Card Captors, Gundam Wing and DBZ. In no time I was completely indoctrinated into the world of anime.
Come college and I am still hooked on anime. My dose has gotten stronger. I am watching shows that are now subtitled and I am loving it. In fact I find myself preferring it to the dubbed versions which I later found to be very childish due to the less than accurate translations and incorrect dramatization of the situations in them. Shows like Hellsing, Naruto, Bleach, Gungrave and Samurai Champloo were a popular staple back then (BTW there are many many more, just can't list them all) . Anyway over time, I started to think that what made for great anime was superb animation and character design. Never crossed my mind that I might fall in love with a show made in the late 80s. I mean the animation back then, was nothing to brag about when you consider the smooth crisp animation in Bleach or the classic Rock Lee vs Gara fight in Naruto.
Enter Fist of the North Star. Some of you might already know that I got a premium Crunchyroll account. So after having watched what I considered all the good stuff on Crunchyroll, I thought I go retro just for kicks. So I watched one random episodes of Fist of The North Star. And a funny thing happened, I enjoyed how the bad guys were killed. The highly unusual nature of their deaths (exploding heads) and the funny screams that precede it, were really intriguing and kinda hilarious. It may sound strange, but I wanted to see more. So instead of proceeding with randomly sifting through episodes of the show, I decided to start from the very first episode.
I spent about 3 hours watching nothing but episodes of this show. I was hooked. In fact the very thing I normally don't like about retro anime was exactly one of the reasons I loved it even more. Its animation style was very fitting. Combine that with the unlimited license to exhibit the disintegration of the human body, the metrics for gauging strength and the hilariously cheesy bromance going on through out the whole show. It had the makings of a classic.
Not to mention the story line was so unique. The characters were all very well developed. Which is no easy feat because normally it can become overwhelming to appreciate each character if there are too many of them. But FotNS did such a good job of keeping the characters significant even though they were numerous. You even learn to appreciate the bad guys and even respect them.
After watching the whole thing, I went online to read about it. Turns out there are a number of remakes for the show. Which isn't suprising. You normally see remakes to something if it was really good. And Fist of The North Star was just that. Really really really good. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend you do. You wouldn't be disappointed.
