The lost anime sequence from Quentin Tarantino movie ‘Kill Bill’
To our understanding, there is not a genre that Quentin Tarantino isn’t a fan of. A lover of all things cinema, the iconic filmmaker behind such classics as Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction has had his say in almost each and every genre, covering westerns, action movies and much more, but there is one area of filmmaking he has barely touched at all, rarely delving into the world of animation.
Vocal in his opinions of the whole spectrum of cinema, Tarantino has only occasionally lent his voice to the world of animation, once naming the 2010 Pixar movie Toy Story 3 a “masterpiece”. Yet, aside from this one-off endorsement, he largely stays away from the cinematic art form dominated by the likes of Studio Ghibli, Dreamworks, Illumination, Sony and more.
With that being said, Tarantino isn’t totally opposed to working with the medium, even including an animated sequence in his 2003 action movie Kill Bill: Volume 1 starring Uma Thurman. The scene comes when the director unveils the backstory of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), telling a violent tale of bloody revenge created in a hand-drawn anime style of filmmaking.
The stunning anime-inspired scene only lasts about seven minutes in the movie, but Tarantino has since revealed that a 30-minute version of the same sequence actually exists, leading fans to insist that they are treated to the cut animation in the near future.
Teasing fans, Tarantino suggested that this scene would appear in full in the four-hour Full Bloody Affair cut of both Kill Bill movies, released back in 2011. Speaking about the potential release of the sequence, Tarantino stated at Comic-Con in 2014, “What’s going on with that is originally back when Kill Bill was going to be one movie, I wrote an even longer anime sequence”.
Continuing, he added: “[Japanese Anime Studio] IG who did Ghost in the Shell said we can’t do that and finish it in time for your thing. And you can’t have a 30-minute piece in your movie…I said okay. It was my favourite part but it was the part you could drop. So we dropped it and then later when IG heard we were talking about doing Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, they still had the script, so without even being commissioned, they just did it and paid for it themselves”.
Despite stating that the sequence was “terrific” and that it would appear in full when The Whole Bloody Affair was released, fans were disappointed to discover that whilst the anime scene had been altered to be even more gory, it wasn’t the extended sequence as promised.
This means that somewhere in the world, a beautifully rendered 30-minute anime sequence from Kill Bill is sitting on someone’s hard drive, with potentially no idea that they are sitting on a piece of much-wanted cinematic gold.
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