This is less a show than a rescued artifact, and watching it feels like reading someone's rejection letter out loud. Nagisa Oshima had already turned Sanpei Shirato's Ninja Bugei-cho into that notorious 1967 feature built out of the manga's own pages, and in 1969 he wanted to push it into television animation. Shirato said no. The plan pivoted to Ninpuu Kamui Gaiden instead, a side story off Kamui Den, and this pilot sat in a drawer for over thirty years until it surfaced as a bonus on volume 7 of the Kamui Gaiden DVD. That is the whole appeal: a few minutes of the anime industry's road not taken, killed by the creator whose work it was adapting, preserved because someone doing DVD extras decided it deserved better. Slept on for obvious reasons, and worth digging up anyway if you care where things could have gone.

Ninja Bugeichou Pilot Film is a short action special: an animated pilot for Ninja Bugei-chou, based on the comic by Shirato. Director Nagisa Ooshima made it in 1969, hoping to follow up his controversial 1967 film with a TV animation. Shirato turned the pilot down, and the project was redirected toward Ninpuu Kamui Gaiden, a side story to his Kamui Den manga, which Ooshima did not work on. The pilot stayed unreleased for over thirty years before appearing on volume 7 of the Ninpuu Kamui Gaiden DVDs.