New York Times, City Section
December 16, 2001

Fighting for Truth, Justice and Fair Rental Practices
By DENNY LEE

THE SETTING: The theatrical premiere of "Rent Wars Ronin," a full-color anime film in which the city's tenant-landlord skirmishes are recast in the fantasy of Dungeons and Dragons. In this pixel-generated world, knighted tenants and "Barracudi" lawyers possess kung fu powers to duel with the likes of Chief Judge Sleazy and Slimy Slumlord.

Word of the premiere had spread through tenant circles like new rent regulations. At 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday, combatants in real rental wars began filing into the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village.

THE BUZZ "We all dream when we go into court and defend our clients, that we are really some superhero," said Brooke Davis, 30, a tenant lawyer with the Brooklyn Neighborhood Office of the Legal Aid Society.

As several dozen people milled in the lobby, waiting for the box office to open, the creator of the film, Ronin Amano, came bursting through the door with the videotape and bad news. Two-thirds of the film had been corrupted by a soft- ware meltdown that morning, said Mr. Amano, a burly paralegal from Park Slope, Brooklyn. So the audiences would get only a "taste."

Disappointment rolled over people's faces, but most paid the $10 admission anyway. They understood this to be a labor of love, scraped together from a secondhand computer and volunteer actors.

After a 30-minute film about the making of "Rent Wars Ronin," the 10-minute clip was shown. "There is a war in progress," the voice-over warned. "For the sake of evil, the Slumlords twist the law to cause agony and despair. But there is at least one tenant who can fight back. One, Ronin."

The animation fell far below Disney standards and the original score had a Nintendo flavor, but the audience didn't care. When Ronin says to himself (as superheroes often do), "But bribes go a long way in the D.H.C.R.," the audience was in stitches at the joke, an allusion to the state's Division of Housing and Community Renewal.

Potato chips and cheese were served afterward, but the audience was hungry to see more of the film. "It's a great concept," said David Powell, 29, a tenant organizer with the Metropolitan Council on Housing, an advocacy group. "It's good to see the age-old struggle between the landed and landless connected to the reality of New York tenants."

Others felt soothed by what they had seen. "It makes you feel like you have an ally," said Yarrow Regan, 44, an unemployed bookkeeper who is in a protracted dispute with her landlord in Queens. "This should be shown in housing court, in the children's room."

Mr. Amano, who stayed up all night finishing the film, only to see his work evaporate, reassured fans that the work could be salvaged from his hard drive. The plan, he said, is to show "Rent Wars Ronin" in full in February on his cable show, "Rent Wars."