A journey through MadHouse chapter 9: a movie that is about nothing really. At the end of the movie I didn't understand what story it was trying to tell us or what themes it was trying to explore. It's just a movie as free as its protagonist. The movie lasts an hour and a half, with each minute that passes it only creates more doubts about where it wants to go and gives you so few answers that when you finish it you are left exactly the same as at the beginning. They want to address so many topics that they don't end up developing anyof them. There is a subplot of Haguregumo and his son, you think they will take the path of a father and son relationship, but in the end it doesn't end up having that much impact and the relationship doesn't suffer any major changes.

It's a bit difficult to understand what the movie is about, it's not because of a lack of clarity in its plot, it's simply that the protagonist is so free in his way of living that everything ends up happening around him but without affecting him directly. Then you start to believe that the movie is trying to show us an important historical moment in ancient Japanese society. Shinsengumi members appear and they make a lot of emphasis on the new era that is about to arrive, but it is a subplot that also doesn't lead to anything.

Ultimately this is a movie that I DO NOT recommend. You can invest the hour and a half that it would take you to finish this anime in something that you might find more fruitful. I have found hidden gems exploring Madhouse's filmography but unfortunately this is not one of them. It is a movie that has not aged well, and you can tell that it has been around for 40 years. Both the artistic and animation sections feel dated, you can see that the techniques used in this production are customs already discarded by the industry. I don't think it is a question of the year in which it was made, because there are other productions even older that remain fresher than Haguregumo. At the end of the day, there was no guarantee that every stop on this journey would be enjoyable.