An excellent start but it quickly dwindles.

As I have not yet gotten around to reading the mangas on which this movie is based I can offer no comparison, but despite my disapointment with this film I am still eager to get my hands on the books.

So to get the obvious out of the way first: a dying warrior offers up the body of his unborn child in exchange for the power to save his clan and rise to power over the land. The child is then abandoned and later found by a man who has the ability to attach living limbs. Once grown he uses his fake body to hunt out the 48 demons who shared out his origional body parts in order to reclaim them.

The film starts well - a brief glimpse at where it all began and a sudden shift to the present where we soon meet our first demon, a demon that is wonderfully imagined but very badly animated. After that it sort of dwindles for 2 hours to a fairly unsatisfying end. But it does occasionally have it's moments and it is worth sticking around.

I have generally found the attempts at humor that are often thrown into this type of movie to be fairly hit and miss, here thay are mostly miss. The idea itself is fantastic but it isn't portrayed in a serious enough manner, the failed attempts to keep the tone light only work to hamper the true tragedy of the story. The special effects are terrible - puppets and computer game style CGI, this may have worked if the film was aimed at 8 year olds, but it was a little scary for such a young audience.

So overall I would have to say this is for the more dedicated fans of this genre, older fans of adaptions such as Kitaro are likely to enjoy this, though not as much.