Review of Samurai Champloo

Samurai Champloo is an interesting one. Being compared with Cowboy Bebop, and generally receiving praise regardless who I asked, I decided to watch it. I finished the anime over a weekend with a friend. My overall reaction? More or less disappointed. The anime begins with the three protagonists of the anime meeting up, fighting each other, and then teaming up. The characters themselves are interesting enough, Jin being a more stereotypical samurai, Mugen more a 'badass' sort of samurai, and Fuu the typical hot girl who can't do anything except get kidnapped. And my, does she get kidnapped. The characters are interesting enough; thehuge problem I had with this anime is its focus. Every single episode the 3 heroes found themselves simply doing the bidding of the town they happened to be in. Every single episode felt like a filler to me, simply because none of the plot being revealed had anything to do with the core plot. I just finished the anime thirty minutes ago, but I've already forgotten almost all the random towns they went to, all the random characters they met, all the random things they did. But who could blame me? I didn't bother remembering any of those character's names or their back stories because I knew by the next episode they would be forgotten by the anime itself. They were all simply wastes of time in order to kill the twenty minutes of the show. Sometimes the fillers would be split into two parters, but they failed to be any more than just fillers in the end. Sometimes the fillers would have characters killed or freed from a brothel, and I was expected to get sad at certain scenes. But how could I? I had only met the characters under twenty minutes ago. They were simply pawns used to get through the twenty minutes.

People sometimes praise this anime's attempt to blend modern culture with the Edo period. I frown upon it, however. The beat boxing, the graffiti, Van Gogh, Christianity, Baseball, all those things were simply distractions trying to get me to forget that I was watching a boring samurai adaptation. In the end they had nothing to do with the core plot and were as quickly forgotten by the heroes as everything else that happened. In addition, the filler stories were extremely predictable, amounting to a simple formula of introduce evil organization that survives off evil, girl gets kidnapped, fight scene, victory, credits. It was so boring I couldn't believe it. Perhaps if the anime's story had been entirely about this evil organization, and the fight scene had been built up over great plot twists and character development, I might have given two shits about this organization. Unfortunately, they are introduced and are defeated in a little over twenty minutes, just like everything else in this anime.

I commemorate this anime's many references to the age of the samurai; however, I refuse to believe that in that time period every single town was corrupt, every single town had gambling men, and every single woman was forced to work in a brothel because of debts. There was certainly more things in the Edo period than just brothels, yet this anime has more than then I can count on my fingers.

I feel as if this anime didn't have to be this way. If there had just been more core plot, and the anime had leaked it better over all 26 episodes, I feel like the whole thing would have been better. For instance, spread the chrisitanity issue out over more episodes, have the characters run into the issue of christianity more times. It was very central to the core plot right? So use it more! Why should I have to watch so many pointless fight scenes where the two immortal heroes just defeat everybody they happen to meet on their journey? Also, why so few episodes on developing the two samurai's? Mugen got two or three episodes on his past, and Jin got something like four. In the end, I didn't learn enough. I wanted to learn more about the main characters, not some random events happening in random towns that our heroes just happened to get involved with.