Sakura Wars: The Movie (2001)
Pioneer Entertainment
Cast:
Extras: Trailers, Clips, TV Spots, Image Galleries
Rating:

With ’Sakura Wars: The Movie’ comes a feature-length adventure from the series to DVD through Pioneer Entertainment. Once again the Flower Division is challenged when a new superior fighting machine promises to be the answer to all of Japan’s defense questions. Strangely though, some of the girls suddenly disappear and the remaining ones quickly take matters into their own hands to find out what is really going on.

Pioneer Entertainment is presenting ’Sakura Wars: The Movie’ in a stunning transfer on this DVD. The image is marvelously clean and rich. A very high level of definition gives the image plenty of detail and the colors are vibrant and bold at all times without ever wavering, blooming or bleeding. Finely delineated, lines are perfectly reproduced and both colors and shadows are reproduced without any flaws on this DVD. The compression has also been handled beautifully to make sure all the image details remain fully intact without any distracting artifacts.

’Sakura Wars: The Movie’ comes with a 5.1 channel Dolby Digital audio track in English and Japanese. The mix of both tracks is very good, though the English version is noticeably louder and has a certain in-your-face quality that the original Japanese track misses. On the downside however, the dub is once again on the border of over-exaggeration, making it hard to sustain for more than a few minutes.

The DVD comes wit ha few selected bonus materials, mostly clips, trailers and TV spots for the film. Three separate image galleries are also included, featuring the film’s characters, bots and backgrounds respectively. A trailer with other anime releases from Pioneer rounds out the release.

’Sakura Wars: The Movie’ looks and sounds beautiful on this release. It is packed with wonderful images and certainly has a lot to offer for fans of the genre. While the story may not be everyone’s bag, the execution of the film and the merits of the DVD are unquestionably among the best.