Review of Samurai Champloo

Brought to use from Shinichiro Watanabe, who most people will remember for Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo is a fantastic looking fusion of Feudal Japan with a contemporary feel, but what lies underneath the surface? The plot begins when Fuu Kasumi, a waitress in feudal japan, is living a fairly normal life...riiight before the brash and arrogant vagabond Mugen decides to crash there for some tea, bringing in quite a few mooks and then our other male lead, the straight faced and cool Jin, to end up entirely wrecking the place and nearly getting them both executed. With some words and some coin flips, Fuu hires Mugenand Jin as her bodyguards while she journeys the land to find a mysterious sunflower scented samurai.

Story-wise, the show is primarily episodic, but tries to have a building plot throughout it involving the sunflower scented samurai and Jin's past. To be honest, though, this mostly ended up amounting to nothing in the end, as the stuff teased in the ending is largely obvious before it even happens and does not amount to all THAT much, mostly on the Jin/Mugen side. This might not be such an issue, except the series tends to tease it out quite a lot over the course of its show, which makes it feel like it is trying to build up to more: This makes the episodic nature feel a bit less fun and the self-contained plots trying to lead into this end up working less. It was particularly tiresome to see the end of the show use this to poor effect, as dramatic leadups to the finale get interrupted halfway through for silly and bizarre episodic plots, which severely hurts the overall narrative and really helped tarnish the story for me. It gets buoyed up by many of the episodic plots being quite solid, at least. One issue is that all of this makes the show very slow feeling, which also hurt it for me.

Character-wise, the main trio of Jin, Mugen and Fuu are all pretty well done, although I feel Fuu could have gotten a bit more focus/depth to her. Jin and Mugen's sharp contrasts nonetheless mixed with many similiarites is a very effective use of the having characters be Foils, although I feel both Jin and Mugen suffer slightly from the plot's developement. The one shot characters are hit and miss, with some great ones like Sara and the gay Hollander, some good-but-not-amazing ones like Mukuro and some really memetic ones like Francisco. The hits weren't large enough to help compensate for the pacing issues and lack of overall strong narrative.

One of the issues I overall had with the show is that the investment I had in the characters was somewhat limited by how the show did not explore them a ton, feeling a bit more like a "monster of the week" style show. Probably one of the bigger examples of this is Jin, as there was a lot of potential to explore the ramifications of his past, but it ultimately mostly gets some token stuff in the story before the admittedly quite cool fight at the end. Fuu also did not get as many focus episodes as I would want and remains a bit too static throughout the series.

One thing this show undeniably has is top notch presentation. The artwork, even about 12 years later as of this writing, is superb and rivals or surpasses a lot of anime that has come past it, with interesting and well drawn character designs for both the beautiful and ugly alike, very well choreographed (although sadly usually short) fights, great facial expressions and even the ability to adapt the style to do things like show traditional Japanese artistic styling. This is combined with a really superb score: Pretty sure that everyone knows about the hip-hop beats and stylings, but less known is that this show actually incorporates a lot of traditional Japanese folk into the mix, and then when you get to some of the combat tracks which can range from graceful to rock, this show spans an impressive amount of genres and manages to do them all quite well, with the OP "Battlecry" being especially memorable with the striking visuals, and an impressively graceful ED.

Still, while the impressive visuals are really nice, the story ends up lackluster, and helps limit the investment of me into these characters by hurting how much I can connect to them because of the shallow exploration of their characters. If you want an episodic, sometimes wacky, sometimes action-y show, then Samurai Champloo will meet your desires, but if your interest lies in the set up they provide in the story and how it evolves in the story, you will find yourself disappointed. It is, if nothing else, enjoyable.