STORY: Genryu’s Shino, an assassin who decided to retire and lead an everyday life, has one small problem: the Yakuza sees his actions as an act of betrayal and now wants him dead. The Yakuza Boss places a 100 million dollar bounty on his head and his mysterious dragon blade. Now Genryu must once again kill, but not for money survival. Once an Assassin, Always an Assassin.
NOTE: This is my first animated short. Originally released in October 2000, updated/released in 2008
FUN FACTS:
- Genryu’s Blade went viral before YouTube was created. Over 40 million views online. Genryu’s Blade was also aired on Showtime as well.
- In 2000, Before Adobe bought Macromedia Flash, Macromedia asked and licensed Genyru’s Blade source flash files for R&D to help make Flash more animator-friendly.
- The Original was created using a desktop computer with a 400 MHz Pentium 2 Processor with 256 megs of RAM. Due to those constraints, the runtime was reduced from 10 to 6 minutes.
- Most of the animation was created by tracing my scanned pencil drawings with a mouse. (Wacom tablets were really expensive back then)
- From start to finish, it took about six months to create this animated short.
- Over the years, I have received hundreds of emails from animators working in big studios that I’ve inspired. (That’s pretty cool. Love you guys.)
So, where’s the sequel?
It is many years old – Maybe I should do like Hollywood and create a reboot instead of a sequel. Who knows? 😛