Thoughts On... Fist Of The North Star

Thoughts On... Fist Of The North Star

Ah, Fist of the North Star. The first anime I ever saw. Sleeping on the floor of a friend's bedroom at the age of thirteen, I was blown away by the graphic violence and terrible voice acting. Whilst the smell of lad might have been permeating the room that night, it was the sensory overload of 'Fist..' (abbreviated for double-entendre dirtiness) was the overwhelming experience of that sweaty night. Whilst I would go on to see more beautiful animation, (Studio Ghibli, I'm eyeballing you here) and better done violence (Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D etc.) I never found another film that feels like Fist Of The North star. For example, in no other film have I ever seen a man punch a spherical indentation into someone else's forehead:

Oooh, me brains!

Another thing that's pretty cool is the fact that Ken regularly fights people who are at least ten feet tall, and they only get bigger as the film goes on:

Fuck reality!

The film begins with a voiceover, an old man talking about the “delicate balance of ying and yang”, “Chaos and Order” and so on. He says, quite matter of factly, that “On Earth, this balance was disrupted by a Nuclear holocaust.” Yep, that'll do it. We then get plunged into the desolate realm of Earth today. Everything is all ruined, dusty vistas. Ken travels with his lover Julia, who carries 'The seeds of new life' or some such shit. It's a bag of seeds. But she insists on being all mystical about it, crying later on when she thinks her precious seeds are lost forever. But yeah, they are soon set upon by Shin, Ken's onetime friend and 'Fist of the South Star'. Surrounded by his heavies, Shin goes on about how Julia is his now because he's the strongest. All Darwinian like. Ken's doesn't like this one bit. So the two do battle. Well, I say 'Battle'. It's more that they jump through the air once and then Ken's limbs explode:

Arghhh, Me limbs!

Shin then proceeds, after earlier stating 'I don't want to hurt you, but I will if it's necessary.', to really unnecessarily hurt Ken by pushing his fingers slowly into Ken's body. In a way that is not at all sexual.

Unngh...

Thrown into a canyon by two men who watch the scene from afar (And who, it transpires, are Ken's brothers), Ken is left for dead. But he isn't really dead, though. That would be rubbish. Shin walks off with Julia, on to a life of Shin's awkward rebuttals of sex with Julia because 'He's tired' or because 'He's clearly gay.'

Ken returns to aid two kids who are getting smacked around by some biker punks. One of the kids is a little girl called Lynn who is a mute. She saw her parents get killed or something and took the patented film coping mechanism of stopping talking. But that's not all, she also has some kind of ESP thing going on, which alerts Ken to her plight. He appears at first as a big old shit monster, casually smashing up buildings to show hard and cool he is:

After he's beaten everyone up. He goes back with the two youngsters to the ramshackle community where they live and cuts off his beard. After another attack, Ken journeys out into the wasteland to try and find his Julia. The villagers don't want him to go – probably because they are tired of constantly getting their asses kicked and being murdered, but Ken offers some vague re-assurance that he'll be back and carries on his way.

Now the film cuts and introduces a few more characters. It's not too hard to keep up but by this point you know that invested and sustained attention to plot is not what this experience is about. It's about watching various outrageously dressed people make other outrageously dressed people's heads explode.

Ken makes his way to the lair of Lord Jagi, who is one of Ken's brothers from before. Jagi has a woman slave and whose brother is along with Ken to get her back. Phew. There's your obligatory up skirt pantie shot as the slave lady is pushed to the floor. Incensed by this unwarranted pantie exposure, ken does battle with Jagi. Jagi is great because he's basically the most deluded guy in all recorded history. He constantly bangs on about how powerful and great he is but is really just a big pussy.

Lord Jagi of Jagishire.

At the apex of their fight, he tries to set Ken on fire, but to no avail. What is fire to a man who has been sexually assaulted fingerwise? Ken then gives Jagi a kicking, leading to Jagi's body to explode apart in a glorious mess.

The action now moves on to following a warlord called 'Raoul', who is another of Ken's brothers. Jesus Christ, what a fucked up family. Raoul is basically invincible and rides around with his army killing anyone in sight, with a view to taking over the world. He's also another of those characters who is ridiculously huge, but then sometimes he appears more normal sized. It's almost as if the animators weren't that bothered about making this film look realistic.

There are also some Julia heavy scenes, basically still spurning Shin's advances whilst he mopes around whining about how Julia doesn't love him. This is all overtaken by Raoul turning up with army and killing everyone though, so at least Shin has his work to find comfort in.Until he gets killed.

Remember... Lather, rinse, repeat. Always... Repeat...BLEP.

The rest of the movie is essentially taken up with Ken walking really, really slowly towards the city where Raoul is killing and torturing people. Even going so far as to tie Julia to a big cross. Why? Who the hell knows? Raoul is a law unto himself.

Eventually, Ken does arrive and is naturally quite pissed off. Him and Raoul fight for about fifteen minutes, pulping each other up good and proper. Raoul at one point screams 'AHH! FUCK!' when his shoulder explodes, as they are liable to do.

After a little while, it all goes a bit DragonBall Z as both men start to generate power aura's and shoot off concentrated wads of energy all over the place. Ken get's that thing when someone is all powered up and their eyeballs go completely white:

Either that, or he was punched so hard that his eyes have rotated the wrong way.

They both end up half dead on the floor. But Raoul is the one who gets up. About to stomp on Ken's head and finish him off, the mute girl from before (now healed of her muteness) talks Raoul down with a speech about how everyone needs to work together in these bleak times. Raoul, amazingly, doesn't punt her over the nearest tall building but instead takes in her innocent words and decides, on the spot, to reform. It's just a shame that girl wasn't around when people were being crucified and murdered earlier on, but oh well, Raoul's an inconsistent guy. He'll probably be back to world domination and fratricide in a couple of weeks.

Ken does manage to heal but, for some reason I've never been able to work, Julia has disappeared and Ken wanders around some newly lush valleys, having hallucinations of her;

One too many heavy blows to the head.

All in all, Fist is a good film. Not 'good' in the classic sense but good in the way that it's enjoyable for it's flaws and not in spite of them. Plus Ken makes this noise: No matter how hard I try, I can't do it.