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Just got back from seeing KAGE. Well worth it. In 23 minutes they showed influences from just about every segment of the ninja genre ever.

Star and Producer/Director Takeshi Maya is aping Henry Sanada circa "Ninja in the Dragon's Den", right down to the twin short swords, trampoline spots and high spin kicks. There are a lot worse influences to have... The villain "Retsu" is played by Shane Kosugi, and Sho Kosugi's production company is thanked in the credits. He's got his dad's side jump kick for sure! Smoking hot Airi Yoshihama is a gymnast with a dance troupe called the G-Rockets and is a regular contestant on the "Sasuke" obstacle course show ("Ninja Warrior" on G4) and she has a decent fight with the female lead Chisa Yokoyama, who the website credits as a major anime voice over actress. Kenji Ooba and Junichi Haruta or the original JAC have small roles as shinobi elders, and there's definitely nods to "Kage no Gundan" throughout the short. So if nothing else, there's quite a bit of genre casting!

All-in-all it's a fun short. Lesser efforts dragged out to heavily padded droning two-hour movies are all-too common. This thing cuts to the chase, tells a really simple story in flashbacks during fight scenes, and pays-off with all the things you want in a ninja flick - cool costumes and tons of fights. The girls' fight is 'over-cranked' a bit, but a respectable effort, and there's a neat anime-style rolling cartwheel scene I just loved. I'm not a fan of high kicks and jumping attacks in ninja movies, and this was way too karate/tae kwon do-like for my personal tastes, but such fights are the flavor of the day and I can't fault Maya for going in that direction.

The press materials brag about the action, the lack of digital assists and wires, etc. and they weren't lying. Basically, if you take that 3-movie "Shinobi" video series and cut out all the walking around the woods and bad acting, extruded only the decent fights and crunched all three flicks into a single 20 minute short, then did B&W film-look over it with some arty burn FX (ala Samurai Fiction), you'd have "KAGE." But don't get me wrong, this is WAAAAY better than those 'Shinobi' movies. The fights have stiff delivery, real impact and some clever kills I haven't seen before.

So for making what little budget he had (and it was probably next-to-nothing, with every penny spent on costumes and post) turn into a maximum of fights and ninja action, I salute Takeshi Maya. There are a lot of other Japanese filmmakers that could take a cue from this and produce direct-to-the-point shorts. When we finally arrive at a state of downloading movies the way we now do music, shorts will have a real home they don't with the DVD market. I hope "KAGE" is ahead of it's time...