Crying Freeman:
Vol. 1-Portrait of a Killer
(Portrait of a Killer/Shades of Death)
(1988)
review by Head Cheeze

As a fan of Kazuo Koike and Ryoichi Ikegami's manga series Crying Freeman, I'd sort of intentionally avoided the anime simply because I knew it was a made for Japanese television series. While I love a lot of anime that had it's origins on Japanese television, I just didn't think that Freeman's abundant violence and sex would make it past the censors (show's ya what I knew about Japanese censors back then, eh?!) and I was concerned that the show's animation wouldn't be up to snuff with the "feature" stuff I'd grown accustomed to. Well, I finally sat down and watched Crying Freeman and I have to say that this is one of the best manga to anime translations I've seen.

Yo Hinamora is a talented Japanese sculptor whose work brings him to New York for an art showing. While in the city, Yo discovers photographs of the Chinese mafia killing a man, hidden in one of his pieces. When the mafia offers to take the photos off of Yo's hands, he refuses and threatens to take them to the police. This, of course, leads to mafia retaliation. However, instead of killing Yo, they see a potential in the man, and force him to train as an assassin. Yo's manipulated by a powerful Chinese medicine man who plants the killing seed in the artists brain, along with a painful reminder of who he once was; Yo will shed tears after each kill.

Now known as Crying Freeman, Yo is in Japan at the behest of the Year of the Dragon clan to kill off Yakuza leaders and help create a beachhead for the mafia to move their drug trade into Tokyo. When Yo is seen killing one such leader by Emu Hino, a lonely young artist, she becomes his next target. However, Yo sees much of his former self in the beautiful Emu, and falls in love with her. Yo, whose freewill has been all but sapped by his "employers", manages to muster enough of it to call off the hit and convince the mafia that Emu need not die. However, the Yakuza and Japanese police have different ideas.

Crying Freeman is a great action romp, in the tradition of The Killer and Hard Boiled, with enough fancy gunplay to warm the cockles of the most hardened of action film fans. While the animation is a bit dated (the show's over 15 years old!), it was well ahead of the curve back then and holds up pretty well. What really stands out about Crying Freeman is the excellent story and background mythology, and that's credited to the faithfullness of the adaptation from print to screen. The Crying Freeman manga is one of the more involved (and decidedly adult) "mainstream" titles available, and the anime follows it tit for tat. Literally.

The DVD from ADV features two episodes (of six), the above synopsised Portrait of a Killer, and Shades of Death, which follows Yo and Emu as they become the target of an equally notorious assassin. Each episode runs 50 minutes, so, essentially, the DVD is a feature length release. The transfer is a full screen port off of the old VHS masters, but looks quite solid (unlike many titles from that period) with few flaws. As with many anime titles, extras are few and far between, with only language and subtitle options, as well as a healthy amount of previews for other ADV releases, presented here.

Crying Freeman is a violent, erotic, and action packed series, and fans of classic Hong Kong style action will find lot's to love about it.