With ‘Cowboy Bebop’ director Shinichiro Watanabe’s newest anime launching this Sunday, AWN columnist Andrew Osmond reviews a very similar series the legendary filmmaker made in 2004… set in samurai Japan and boasting a strikingly different soundtrack.
We’re in the build-up to the release of Shinichiro Watanabe’s new science-fiction spectacle, , which will be serialized on Adult Swim starting this Sunday, April 6.So, it seems a fitting time to look back at one of Watanabe’s classics that turns 21 next month.
First, though, here’s the trailer for.In 1998, Watanabe made a series whose action harked back to 1970s TV and movies, spliced together with sci-fi and spaceships.He called it , and its reputation got so big that when Watanabe made his next show six years later, the easiest way to sell it to viewers might have been, “, but in samurai Japan.” That’s , streaming on Crunchyroll in America, and it’s the series I’m covering today.
Like , is pervaded by a mature sense of cool.It’s not clear if any of ’s three leads are out of their teens – the girl Fuu is explicitly said to be 15 – but they live in a harsh world where people grow up fast.They’re street-smart, independent by nature, and seem to have absolutely nothing in common with each other.
Jin is the samurai equivalent of the straight-shooter.He’s beautifully elegant, studious and serious, which makes it all the more a shock when we learn he fragged the master of his and is on the run.His polar opposite is Mugen, a loutish, graceless youth whose only interest seems to be picking fights and developing his extraordinarily random combat skills.
These involve his feet as much as his sword and often see him taking a flying leap to stomp on someone’s face.Mugen and Jin are improbably brought together by Fuu, a woman who looks (and is) physically delicate, but who’s also immensely resourceful – her companions would say .In the first episode, the men get involved in a messy brawl at the teahouse where Fuu is serving and end up sentenced to death.
Fuu helps them escape; in return she demands they escort her through Japan as she seeks a mystery man, “the samurai who smells of sunflowers.” For most of the series that’s all we know about Fuu’s target.We finally find out who he is, and the series has a proper ending, but Watanabe confessed he didn’t know who the samurai was at the start.More importantly, it was a way to set up the same situation as.
The characters travel together, operating together, but they’rereluctant to call each other friends or comrades.Jin and Mugen have an instant-brewed rivalry, each swearing they’ll kill the other as soon as their journey’s done.Fuu is a less forbidding character, and Part 2 makes clear she’s actually very kind.
She’s captured by a warrior with a huge body and a face that most people see as monstrous.This man confesses to Fuu that he lost control and slew many of his persecutors.But Fuu is entirely sympathetic to him, not because she’s planning a getaway, but because it’s her nature.
(Horror fans may spot the episode’s referencing films, down to the torch-bearing mob that drives the “monster” away.) Soon after (in Part 4), Mugen has the chance to quit his journey completely, but ends up going back and helping his partners.It’s suggested this isn’t because of his feud with Jin but rather because of Mugen’s inescapable sense that he Fuu, even if he curses her at the same time.Mugen’s decision comes just after a glimpse of a Buddha statue on a rainy roadside – not the last time the series will invoke religious symbols.
It’s sentimental, but it’s a “cool” sentimentality that keeps the characters from being too cozily likeable.At the same time, it suggests the series might not finish the same way as .When you’re watching , you might recall a haunting line, almost an epitaph, from ’s last episode.
“They’ve all lost their sense of place in the world, like kites without strings or tails.” A Buddha statue may be a corny symbol of Mugen’s conscience, but at least it’s something solid to lean on.High drama and loony tunes Viewers, though, might feel they’ve lost their own sense of place in .That’s because of its manic swings in tone, from high (often tragic) drama to absurd, madcap comedy.
Of course, that’s something else the show shares with.On the one side, there are episodes full of delicate character drama, or a breathtaking action climax, or both of them at once.Try counting how many crucial moments in hinge on characters deliberately striking a blow and making you feel the absence.
It’s a samurai’s equivalent of one hand clapping.And then there are the show’s “loony tunes” episodes.There’s one where the action revs up until someone burns a field with the wrong kind of grass, and then we’re into a drug-induced rave and jokes about “Purple Haze” and the summer of love.
And that’s not even the furthest-out episode.Another tale ends with Armageddon falling from space and a hallucinogenic mushroom cloud.Then there’s a bawdy farce episode like a reverse James Bond film, where a sex-crazed Mugen is mercilessly used by a female secret agent.
And then there’s one about graffiti-tagging gangs in samurai-era Japan, with a cameo by a thinly-disguised Andy Warhol.The funniest thing, though, is the teacher who gets mad when the graffiti’s , even if the joke was pinched (maybe) from the Monty Python film . Then there’s the episode everyone remembers, where the characters get dragged into a baseball game with horrid Americans.They’ve come in their battleship to open up Japan to the world, only they’ve come too soon – every Japanese schoolkid knows they’re not due until 1853.
The ensuing episode runs on cartoon logic only, like those old Disney sports cartoons with crowds of competing Goofys.Only here it’s the characters on one side, battling grotesque Americans on the other, with the Yanks hellbent on subduing those savage Japanese.In the happy ending, Mugen smashes them all, then drives them back to America.
“Friggin’ kamikaze!” a defeated player groans.All these loony elements must have kept the show’s creators on their toes, while selling the anime as not your parents’ samurai show.The very first episode starts with a punkish caption – “This work of fiction is not an accurate historical portrayal.
Like we care.Now shut up and enjoy the show.” Production data was animated at the then-new Manglobe studio.(Manglobe would file for bankruptcy in 2015, though many of its staff transferred to the still-running Geno Studio.) Unsurprisingly, many elite artists worked on it.
Perhaps the most identifiable was Masaaki Yuasa (, ) who contributed key animation to Part 9 – some shots are obviously his.Mamoru Hosoda (, ) was a pseudonymous “unit director” on the show’s title sequence, and he also directed some of the first episode.The opening titles were animated by Takeshi Koike, the future director of .
Sayo Yamamoto storyboarded four parts – she’d go on to direct the road movie-style series , and then to directing .For all the analogies between and , it’s worth specifying that, Watanabe aside, ’s main creators played little or no role in the series.’s leading writer, Keiko Nobumoto, is only credited for one episode, Part 16.
As for ’s feted composer Yoko Kanno, Watanabe didn’t use her as she didn’t have a hip-hop background.Setting samurai to hip-hop The show’s hip-hop soundtrack was created by four main composers (three Japanese, one American). If nothing else, you’ll probably remember the show’s mellow English-language title song, “Battlecry,” which was composed by the Japanese Nujabes (Jun Seba) and written and sung by the rapper Shing02 (Shingo Annen).Shing02 still performs today; Nujabes died in a car crash in 2010, aged 36.
Hip-hop had a peak presence in anime when was shown.Two other high-profile series in 2004, and , both had hip-hop title songs (here and here).In interviews, Watanabe did his best to claim there were links between hip-hop and the style and substance of .
For example, Watanabe said he was inspired by hip-hop’s free use of sampling, and he thought samurai resembled hip-hop singers in their drive to express themselves, whether through a sword or a mic.Neither argument stands up to much reflection.Mugen’s fighting style often resembles breakdancing, which lends a fresh vividness to the action scenes.
It’s a worthy successor to Spike’s Jeet Kune Do fighting style in .But the way that sets up a maverick, disreputable, glory-seeking fighter (Mugen) in contrast to a disciplined, sober swordsman (Jin) will feel very traditional if you’ve seen most famous samurai film of all, made 70 years ago.Granted, most of the samurai in Akira Kurosawa’s are sober Jin-types, but that only lets the wild man Kikuchiyo, played by Toshiro Mifune, steal the film.
Mugen would approve.For all of ’s brash irreverence, the anime feels underpinned by tradition, and its themes are far from random.Watanabe himself pointed up one of his main intents in interviews, which was to make an inclusive vision of Japan that went beyond “Japaneseness.” (Hayao Miyazaki had done something similar a few years before with his film .) Even Japanese viewers might miss some of ’s subtleties.
For example, there’s ’s most noble supporting character, a fugitive called Okuru who’s being hunted by the authorities.He’s dressed in the style of the Ainu, an oppressed ethnic group in Japan.This was long before the manga and anime would put the Ainu center stage.
Even more crucially, Mugen himself is a foreigner to Japan.As he mentions in Part 1, he’s from the Ryukyus, an island chain (including Okinawa) to the far south of Japan’s mainland.It was oppressed by Japan for centuries, though it only became “part” of Japan in 1879, long after the anime’s timeframe.
For all of Watanabe’s extolling of hip hop, he said in one interview that he made in order to use a very different kind of music.Specifically, it was to include a scene (in Part 14) where a native Okinawan song plays while Mugen seemingly “falls” towards his death through a medley of previously unseen memory-flashbacks.As any Watanabe fan should spot, it’s a close match for the famous “Green Bird” sequence in .
“Champloo” itself is an Okinawan word, meaning “something mixed.” The foreigner factor The show’s expanded vision of Japaneseness exists alongside a running concern with Japan’s relationship with the outside world.An early episode has the characters encountering an eccentric foreigner, a Dutchman.He’s gay, and sees Japan as a utopia of gay tolerance.
The character seizes on a Japanese literary classic – , by the “floating world” poet Ihara Saikaku – with the same idealistic passion that some gay Western manga fans have when they discover strips today.The utopian vision is brutally undercut at the episode’s end, when Mugen makes a homophobic quip at the character’s expense.Then there’s an implicit joke in the idea of a samurai smelling of sunflowers.
In Part 5, a weirdly prophetic character talks about the future artist Vincent Van Gogh, and how his revolutionary paintings of sunflowers would be inspired by Japanese painters, such as Hishikawa Moronobu.(That’s all real history.) The same episode becomes a scandalous secret history of Moronobu, and how he came to paint sexually charged portraits of beautiful young women.Fuu is involved.
Much later in the series, when the mystery samurai’s identity is revealed, it turns out to be bound up with a foreign – Christianity.There are references to the Shimabara Rebellion, a 17th-century insurrection that involved Japan’s Christians, though it probably wasn’t driven by them.The anime depicts Christians as another persecuted minority, though one which harmed innocents in turn.
For other takes on the subject, see the anime series , also available on Crunchyroll, or Martin Scorsese’s live-action film .Finally, foreigners are central to the ludicrous, low-brow cartooning of ’s baseball episode, which takes the nuanced and sometimes tortured history of Japan’s relationship with the outside world and turns it into a crude joke.Watanabe himself stressed that was absolutely meant to be a “nationalistic” series about Japan… though it can be mistaken as such rather easily, if you miss the references to the Ainu and the Ryukyu Islands, and take the baseball episode the wrong way.
But even leaving nationalism aside, you could make a case that Japan has an unusual relationship to its own history, precisely of foreigners.Samurai-era Japan was effectively ended when the real American battleships arrived in 1853, forced Japan to open to the world, and ended its centuries-long time warp of isolation.That led to Japan’s accelerated transformation into a modern nation in the decades leading up to Pearl Harbor.
Following that catastrophe and Japan’s devastation, the country underwent high-speed transformation into the high-tech Japan we have now. Again, this was only made possible by America, which wanted a country-sized bulwark against communism.All of this happened at dizzying speed, historically speaking.You might think the Japan of swords and samurai wasn’t so much transformed as cancelled, cut short by foreign powers, as if Japan was rushed onto a different timeline.
Could that be why is just one of many anime mashing up Japan’s past and present? Think of Goemon, the completely old-school samurai operating in the present day through the 50-year franchise, much of which is available on the HiDive platform.There’s the mammoth comedy franchise, which was just starting when was made.It shows Japan being occupied by space aliens rather than Americans and retaining samurai alongside its TVs and manga comics.
Not to mention Masaaki Yuasa’s 2021 movie , which drops ’s hip-hop and instead introduces the Japan of past centuries to musicians resembling Hendrix, Bowie and Queen.Again and again in anime, the present bleeds through to the past, and the past to the present.holds up for many reasons, from its nonchalantly adult characters to the frenetic beauty of its swordplay.
But maybe it helps that it reflects the shape of Japanese history.Andrew Osmond is a British author and journalist, specialising in animation and fantasy media.His email is [email protected].
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