Samurai Champloo

2004. TV series. (26 X 30 min.) Historical adventure/comedy. dir Shinichiro Watanabe. scr Dai Sato, others. des Kazuto Nakazawa, Mahiro Maeda, Takeshi Waki, Masahiro Emoto. -bc

Cowboy Bebop meets Rurouni Kenshin in this clever, modern take on traditional Japanese swordplay dramas, with ample humor and lots of well-staged action, as two slackers and a girl embark on a journey in 18th-century Japan.

In 18th-century Japan, two wandering expert swordsmen, Mugen and Jin, cause trouble separately and then with each other before being caught and slated for execution. They manage to escape with the help of Fuu, a teenage girl who enlists them in her quest to find “a samurai who smells of sunflowers.” They travel across Japan towards Nagasaki where Fuu believes she’ll find the most recent traces of her elusive quarry. On the way, they have an odd assortment of adventures and encounters in different towns and cities.

In one episode, Mugen and Jin wind up on opposite sides in a clash between yakuza gangs over control of a town, and Fuu is forced to work in a brothel. In another, the three travelers give a gay Dutch merchant a guided tour of Edo. They meet an artist who will one day be called “the father of ukiyo-e.” They spend time at a Zen monastery with a monk, a former martial arts teacher who is now threatened by a powerful and vengeful ex-student. They play baseball with a team of brutish American sailors. They are forced into helping a mad descendant of the Heike Clan who has a zombie army digging for buried clan treasure.

Finally, they reach Itsuki Island, off of Nagasaki in southwestern Japan, where Fuu tracks down the man she’s been seeking and learns his true relationship to her. He harbors a secret that has made him a wanted man, and certain parties have followed Fuu to find him. Jin and Mugen also have checkered pasts that catch up to them at the same time, and the two swordsmen find themselves squaring off together for one last battle.

Samurai Champloo is simply dripping with style. There are several deliberately anachronistic touches, such as onscreen fast-forwarding or rewinding of the images, so that shooting ahead in time is like searching for a scene on a tape. There are scene transitions marked by rapid cuts back and forth between one scene and the next, as if a deejay was spinning scenes like they were records, with the appropriate sound effects on hand as well. Mugen does break-dancing moves in his swordplay and also on the mound when he pitches during a makeshift baseball game. All this is to lull young viewers into thinking they’re watching something edgy or hip-hop inspired when what they’re really watching is a traditional swordplay story steeped in Japanese history and culture that is played out, for the most part, with a deep reverence for these subjects.

The character design tends to echo that of Cowboy Bebop, with long, lanky limbs and outrageous hairstyles, yet the characters seem more comfortable in these bodies and faces than the more overtly stylized characters in Rurouni Kenshin do, to cite the two most obvious inspirations for this series. Mugen, for instance, has a shaggy, unruly head of hair, but it looks like it belongs on his head, like he came by it honestly, not as if an artist just plastered it there in the manner of Sanosuke’s spiky ’do in RK. Mugen seems the closest in style to Cowboy’s Spike, although he lacks Spike’s polish and worldliness, which has been shifted to Jin, Mugen’s reluctant partner, who wears glasses to give him a more modern look, although without them he wouldn’t seem all that out of place in a more traditional costume drama. Fuu, in the Faye Valentine role, is younger, more girlish, and less voluptuous than Faye, but also more earnest and more focused on a noble goal. Unlike Faye, Fuu is the moral center of this series.

Many traditional Japanese settings are re-created in great detail here, from the gambling dens, tea­houses, and monasteries of the towns they visit to the bustling streets of Edo and a theater where we see a full-scale kabuki performance. There are works of art from the period, including a catalog of woodblock prints, and illustrations from books of the period. While the general appearance and dress of the main characters may seem anachronistic, and the contacts with Europeans and Americans may seem a little far-fetched, the other details, at least, evoke historical Japan in a way that gives some real substance to the proceedings.

The swordplay action is fluidly animated, well staged, and handled at times as it would be in a live-action samurai film, with few of the gimmicky touches and fancy editing of Rurouni Kenshin, to name another recent series with lots of traditional swordplay.

Shinichiro Watanabe also directed Cowboy Bebop, both the TV series and movie, and two episodes of The Animatrix, “Detective Story” and “Kid’s Story.” Chief writer Dai Sato has also written for Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Wolf’s Rain, and Eureka 7. Masahiro Emoto (animator, Ghost in the Shell, Tenchi Muyo in Love, Serial Experiments Lain, Jin-Roh, Millennium Actress) created the ukiyo-e paintings seen in episode 5, “Artistic Anarchy.”

Samurai Champloo has all the virtues of the same creators’ Cowboy Bebop, with none of the flaws. Unlike Bebop, it has a central motivation for the characters that keeps the narrative moving from the very start. Also unlike Bebop, every story along the way is worth telling and is beautifully written and planned, with seeds planted early that sprout later with great effect. There’s a great deal of humor, all character-driven, derived from the collision of three disparate personalities thrown together by fate and the eccentric people they encounter. Yet most of the stories are generally serious affairs with something important at stake and a character hook that engages the audience. In the two-part “Hellhounds for Hire,” for instance, an ethical yakuza boss is challenged by a corrupt interloper who abducts the young female tutor of the boss’s son, claiming her craftsman father has a gambling debt. Jin and Fuu wind up on the side of the good boss while Mugen, out for a quick buck and a chance for action, winds up working for the bad guy, alongside the former lieutenant of the good boss. It’s a tale of shifting loyalties and moral dilemmas, with characters we genuinely care about, yet it’s packed with swift, bloody swordplay and ample moments of farce, as when Fuu, newly escaped from a brothel, is mistaken for the designated dice thrower, and taken by palanquin to the big gambling showdown which will decide who gets to rule the town.

The anachronistic touches, including the hip-hop flourishes cited earlier, are joined by considerable fudging of the historical timeline, with actual historical figures appearing a hundred years too late or too soon. The opening legend tells us what to expect when it declares, “This work of fiction is not an accurate historical portrayal. Like we care. Now shut up and enjoy the show.” Even so, a case can be plausibly made that this series offers more genuine Japanese historical and cultural material and, more importantly, inspires more interest in further research, than any other similarly themed historical anime, including Dagger of Kamui, Ninja Scroll, and Rurouni Kenshin. The latter series was, in fact, steeped in references to the events of Japan’s civil war that brought the Tokugawa shogunate to a close and began the Meiji era, yet it offered them without any context, so that American viewers unfamiliar with this history were left overwhelmed and puzzled as to who fought with who and against whom. Samurai Champloo, with its freewheeling approach, actually makes a concerted effort to provide context.

Even though the series is set during Japan’s long period of isolation, some of the episodes detail links, both direct and indirect, to Western culture. A gay Dutch merchant comes to Japan expecting to find the sexual freedom outlined in a classic Japanese text he’d come across. An artist who paints sunflowers seeks to leave Japan for the West where he can learn new techniques, and it’s implied that one of his paintings eventually wound up in the possession of one Vincent van Gogh. A stay by the trio in a Zen monastery is punctuated by a brief montage about America’s Zen-influenced Beat Generation. A crew of American sailors seeking to open trade with Japan is challenged to a game of baseball, with the fate of Japan at stake. While the series displays the occasional trace of nostalgia for the period preceding Japan’s opening to the West, it does acknowledge the positive side of Japan’s impact on the West and vice versa.

In the two-part “Hellhounds for Hire,” Mugen and Jin, supposedly partners, wind up on opposite sides in a war between rival yakuza clans over control of a small but bustling town. While different enough from Akira Kurosawa’s classic sword-for-hire tale Yojimbo (1961) not to be called a rip-off, it is similar enough to be considered a takeoff—or an homage, take your pick. Either way, it’s a great story and gives each of the main characters a chance to shine on their own.

Episode 5, “Artistic Anarchy,” features artist Moronbu Hishikawa and re-creates many examples of ukiyo-e, the art of color woodblock prints. There is a whole shop of these pictures as well as a book of illustrated erotica for special customers that winds up in the hands of the main characters. Fuu poses for the artist and is persuaded to pull her kimono down to reveal her bare back. One of the prints on display is a re-creation of an actual work of Hishi­kawa. A brief historical side note, provided by narrator “Manzou the Saw,” an undercover constable, ties this work to Vincent van Gogh and suggests that it may have been the inspiration for the Dutch painter’s famous sunflower paintings a hundred years later.

Episode 10, “Lethal Lunacy,” features a character, Shouryuu, who had studied Shaolin kung fu in China, and comes back to Japan to prove his superiority to Japan’s karate masters by fighting and killing them. His behavior so shocks his former teacher that he becomes a Buddhist monk to atone for not saving Shouryuu’s soul. This is pretty much a straight martial arts episode that finds Mugen unable to resist the challenge posed by Shouryuu.

Several characters are actual historical figures, including the aforementioned artist Moronbu Hishikawa (1618–94), considered the “father of ukiyo-e.” In the baseball episode, the characters of American officers Joy Cartwright and Doubleday are meant to invoke Alexander Joy Cartwright and Abner Doubleday, two men with competing claims to the designation “inventor of baseball.” A sequence on Zen Buddhism includes a montage of images of the Beat Generation in the U.S. in the 1950s, including a photo of poet Allen Ginsberg (Howl) and a likeness of Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac (On the Road).

Episode 6, “Stranger Searching,” includes a reference to The Great Mirror of Male Love, a famous illustrated text by Ihara Saikaku about love between men, and features illustrations from the book.

Episode 12, “The Disorder Diaries,” references Edo-period “dime novel” author Harumachi Koikawa, who pioneered the cheap mass publication known as kibyoshi, an illustrated novel that was a precursor of manga. Pictures from one of his works, Mudaiki, are displayed, prompting the response from the narrator, “What’s up with those dumbass hairstyles?”

violence Sword fighting and violence with ample bloodshed on a regular basis. profanity Profanity in the subtitles and on the soundtrack. nudity Suggestive sexual scenes and semi-nudity.