An extremely mature middle school girl falls down a well and ends up in the Feudal era where she releases a demon who has been sealed to a tree for 50 years. The demon was sealed because another demon played him and his girlfriend against one another to get a sacred jewel. The modern girl and feudal demon team up with a child fox demon, a lecherous monk with a vacuum hand, a 2-tailed cat that grows and flies and a demon slayer woman whose group has been killed by her younger brother.
I watched the entire duration of 197 videos. Most were 20 minute TV episodes, besides the 4 hour and a half movies. It's a lot of Inuyasha. The plot seemed standard and stereotypical for anime, featuring mainly searches for characters and items, fights and comic relief. I liked comic relief the most in this series. There were episodes devoted to secondary characters that entertained me more than the main plot of the series. Because it was made for TV, there were frequent "plot recaps" to inform viewers who were not watching the whole series straight through what was happening. There were tons of characters and many of them had similar names: Naraku, Kohaku, Kagura, Kaguya, the list goes on. I know I'm an American, looking at Japanese names from an etic perspective, but they seemed too similar to me. What I liked about the characters was variety. There were humans, half demons and demons in every available Dungeons & Dragons alignment. Each of the main characters had identifiable personality traits that were demonstrated at every opportunity. An example of this is the monk touching the demon slayer's butt. Much of the dialogue was characters saying each other's names: "INUYASHA!!" "KAGOME!!" which got old quickly. The English voice actors fit the Japanese animated characters well enough for my tastes. Only Final Act was subtitled and not dubbed. I found the Japanese voices disorienting because I was so used to the English dubbed version, having watched 167 episodes by that point. On a side note, I heard a few phrases so frequently that I rewrote them as qwerty keyboard and sexual innuendo references: Sexomaru, No-cock-u, Titsaiga, Bitcoin jewel and Inutrasha's famous attacks: Spacebar , Backslash wave\\\\, Ampersand Barrage&&&& and Cheesy Beaver Hole Feeler. Animation style was a mix of traditional anime with some computerized effects. I could tell the difference, but a person less versed in digital video effects may not be able to discern between the two. They were blended very well and the CG was used extremely tastefully and sparsely. As with any TV series, the music was repetitive. There were a few theme tracks for battle, comedy, drama, etc. that just got copied and pasted where they were needed. The anime series was quite popular and the 4 movies got 7.5-7.9 on IMDB. My real anime comparison test is Dragonball. This was goofier than Z and GT, but not as goofy as original DB. It was also not as good, but Goku and friends set a pretty high mark to beat. Inuyasha is nice to have in addition to Dragonball though. I rate it good. It must have been for me to still like it after watching that much.
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