SCENE BREAKDOWN | Rurouni Kenshin Tsuioku Hen | Assassination Scene
Finally it is time to talk about some sakuga instead of all the life stuff. I have a lot of nerding out to do here. Especially on this site where everyone is having philosophical, deep and existential writings. (do not worry i am one of you too :D ). Okay let us deep dive into this scene.
Watch the scene here The whole scene lasts 34 seconds. This is the single most favorite fight scene of all time for me in the world.
The act/play of the fight
What i like the most about the scene is that they are literally fighting. Fighting is a game which both players are trying to subdue or kill each other. There are not pseudo achievements to achieve other than to win the game. Which makes it great. Your techniques and strenght do not matter as long as you dont win. So the most important condition is to win in a fight. In most fight scenes not only in anime but in the whole media is most of the time the characters are not engaging in the game of fighting rather they are acting to fight. They are not trying to achieve the state of winning but rather they seem like they are trying to achieve certain objectives that look like fighting.
So what makes this scene great apart from that they are literally fighting ? Well it is because it is a SHOW DO NOT TELL scene. Even though the characters do not talk to each other at all we can see and understand everything that happens in the fight. The character does not have to tell you what he does because you already see it anyway. You see, you understand and an actual outcome comes at last at the end of the scene that means something for the story it happens in. Which makes it great. Because in most scenes you cannot really see what is happening, if you somehow managed to see what is happening in the scene you cannot really understand it and if you even manage to do that it does not make sense (the players do not actually engage in the activity of fighting so the moves do not make sense in the context of fighting). Yet in this scene everything is right before our eyes and everything is understandable. If you do fight you will understand that this is a great scene.
Let us breakdown
So in the opening of the scene kenshin and the assassin have a face off where they think about what do do next. The assassin decides that he will attack and kenshin simultanously deflects that attack with his sword and counter attacks himself. Yet that was all a set up by the asssassin. Assassin has a chained double wakizashi. So when he attacked with throwing one of his wakizashi he actually set his main attack up. He knew that the kenshin would deflect it so it was not a real attack but just a set up. The real attack was to get kenshin tangled up in chains so he is vulnerable to attacks.
Set ups
Set ups are one thing that gets overlooked or done extremely badly in almost all media. A proper and experienced fight cannot happen without set ups. After a certain skill level no one eats a vanilla punch. You have to set it up.
So in this scene actually the kenshin pretty much loses. He played right into his opponent's hands. He bit the bait and cannot do much at that moment. The rest is psychological. Instead of panicking and trying to get out of the bound quickly kenshin just waits until the assassin gives away.
The psychological counter attack
Given kenshin's situation the assassin thinks that he completely has kenshin in his hand at the moment and decides to finish the fight. So he jumps expecting kenshin to stay still. However kenshin was waiting for the assassin to give a moment for him to do something and that is the moment. Since assassin is mid air he cannot control kenshin but since kenshin is grounded and he did not panic and made his situation worse his footing is reasonably well so he has the control over assassin at the moment. The moment assassin jumps kenshin just pulls him by his own chains and attacks with his own chained wakizashi ending the fight by dividing the assassin into 2 equal parts. Which concludes as kenshin winning the fight.
Discussion
There is more to fight scenes than OH HE HAS WON BECAUSE HE HAS 5000 POWER. OH WELL NOT REALLY BECAUSE THE OPPONENT'S WATER POWER ENHANCES HIS 3000 POWER INTO MUDDY ATTACK TRAIT AND MAKES IT SO IT IS NOW 9000 POWER SO HE WINSSSS turning a fight scene into an mmorpg style spreadsheet or OH HE HAS WON BECAUSE HE IS BUILT DIFFERENT and they are not only action filler scenes. Personally i get incredibly bored in scenes where they make it so there are visual effects everywhere and they scream all the time. This is not fighting this is rather more like a pretend play of fighting. Fighting is more about positioning, strategies psychology and all of these has to be told by the visuals not by narrative voices in my opinion. One of the things that bugs me is when they portray a character to be a master of fighting and they make it so that character beats 15 guys at the same time even if they are behind him. No masterful fighting is not beating people magically. Masterful fighting is done in a way so that you will have the more dominant position against the odds so that you can win. If you let someone get behind you and you still beat him that does not mean that you are fighting masterfully that means your opponents are retards. And that alone takes all the impressiveness out of the scene in my opinion.
I will be covering more stuff like this in future in my blog. So feel free to reach out to me if you want to talk about it :]. Have a good day.