Fist of the North Star

After a nuclear war the world is desert. Whoever holds the water, the food and the weapons rules. Kenshiro is the heir to a martial art called Hokuto Shinken; he strikes pressure points and the person he strikes bursts from inside a few seconds later. His fiancée Yuria has been taken by Shin, the man he grew up with as a brother. Toyoo Ashida directs for Toei Animation, from the manga by Buronson and Tetsuo Hara. The film compresses a long stretch of the manga into ninety minutes, which is both its strength and its problem. The narrative moves fast and many background characters get only a few scenes. The scale of the violence is a threshold in itself. Bursting bodies, severed limbs and blood are shown without softening, and the film was released cut in many countries as a result. Its impact in the West was large. Circulating on video through the eighties and nineties, it was in many countries the first encounter audiences had with anime made for adults, and it directly shaped how the form was perceived from outside. Kenshiro's lines, particularly the one he says to the man he has killed, are widely repeated in popular culture. Who it is for: viewers who like eighties anime, post apocalyptic narrative and martial arts fiction. Who it is not for: the violence is genuinely extreme, and without the manga the relationships between the characters are not explained enough.