the sword remind me of guts of berserk :)

Thanks for the help eishiya. I like your scrolling suggestion - now that you'll mention it, I'd probably separate all background depths in a scene like this to achieve the parralax you see in those films.

The character and background don't look like they belong together. The background is very smooth, even blurry, while the character is very sharp. The perspective also seems to be different on the character than on the background.

I think the blurriness is something to fix because it looks unappealing, however I don't think you need to make the background as sharp (un-AAed) as the character. It's understandable that a sprite can't be AAed, while the background can. However, it would help to ease the transition by having some midground elements that are behind the character but are not as heavily AAed. That would help "ground" the character(s) in the scene. A midground would also let you have parallax scrolling, which would suit the samurai movie look.