Review of The Elusive Samurai

Elusive Samurai is a show where is exceptionally shrugged upon and under the damn rug. I barely see anyone talking about it. Easily top 5 of this season of anime (although not many good anime were here this season but I digress). Wonderful animation, good characters, decent story, and humor that actually caught me off guard. The one thing that was apparent is it’s obvious the animation department is struggling a bit. Elusive Samurai is amazing and has multiple episodes where it rivals Studio Ghibli especially with it’s soft colored and painted art, but you can see when CGI is used, and I think some partsof the anime didn’t cook enough. It isn’t much of an issue though since 80% of the anime is CHEFS KISS. But episode 4 and episode 12 were easily the worst in the animation department, almost fully utilizing still frames and janky CGI. But, I cannot talk ill of the rest.

The characters are good, but there are some that are just ‘there’ or ‘aight’ y’know, it’s a historical Shonen so expect some IRL names portrayed into characters like Dazai in BSD. Symbolisms in the anime were portrayed very well with what would be going on in 1333. The art is versatile too, a lot of sakuga, some stop motion, real life footage, cutout animation, and ofc the CGI. It’s like fucking Gumball.

Suwa is easily the best character~ (totally not biased because of Gojo VA)

They also have a lot of ugly ass characters as villains that gross me out. So thank you Elusive Samurai, I did not need to see protruding eyeballs and ears with teeth.
I wish some characters had development or some relevance, I do like some like Genba, Tokiyuki, and Suwa but everyone else is meh or aight. Hopefully we see more diverse personalities than one-note characters with 1 specific quirk, like Demon Slayer.

The story is well written. Very unique too and is sometimes even fourth wall breaking and can have a few jabs in the modern world as well, delivered by the future seeing Suwa. Times were tough in 1333, that’s for damn sure.