Results tagged “Shinichiro Watanabe”

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sa·mu·rai n. 1: military nobility of feudal Japan; from verb meaning to wait upon or accompany a person in the upper ranks of society

cham·ploo n. 1: Okinawan term for “something mixed”

Attitude. Amazing how so much meaning can be soaked up into a single word. When someone says samurai attitude, or hip-hop attitude, you know what they mean. The former is Forty-Seven Ronin and Rising Sun and Shining Steel. The latter is Jump Around Y’All and Up In This Beeyotch and Cash Rules Everything Around Me. The two barely belong in the same sentence, let alone the same show. Well, here they are. Deal.

Samurai Champloo is all about how attitudes collide, how cultures and sensibilities mix and create something new. It is itself a whole great big jumble of things: a road movie, an anti-romantic triangle (most of the main characters can’t stand each other, hilariously so), an experiment in combining past and present aesthetic sensibilities, a period samurai adventure, a comedy, a drama, a stone cold classic. And it gets all the better each time you come back to it — deeper, smarter, and funnier. It’s not just a gimmick showcase.

Watch a DJ at work: he drops the needle seemingly at random, backs up, overlays beats from two records you’d never think to play on top of each other. The same thing happens here right from the first episode, where we start with an execution in progress and then jump back 300 years — er, 24 hours — to see How It All Got Started. And it starts almost like a setup for a joke: These two guys walk into a bar …

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After the samurai-honor-meets-B-boy-attitude of Samurai Champloo, I backtracked to its immediate predecessor, the jazz-riffs-on-Wild-West-in-space of Cowboy Bebop. Describing a show this influential, this aesthetically solid and this fun is like talking about a sunset over the phone: it might be better to watch it first, get bitten by the bug, and then come back here to talk it over. It is probably no exaggeration to call it one of the best anime ever made, but why it works and works so well is not a question of genre or attitude. The show succeeds because it stars some of the most irresistible and unforgettable characters around, gives them the freedom to speak their minds and do their thing, and puts them in a story that makes us care deeply about what transpires. We don’t want to just watch them, but climb up in there and jam with them, and when it’s over — with, quite literally, a bang — it’s like good friends have left us.

The story is set in an only slightly-romanticized version of a far future, where mankind has spread out through the whole of the solar system but many of the same problems remain: terrorism, crime, stupidity, greed and plain old boredom. Spike Spiegel and Jet Black are old hands at dealing with almost all of the above — they’re freelance bounty hunters, knocking around the solar system in the Bebop, a tattered crate of a ship that was probably already heavily used when they bought it. Most of their big leads come in over the TV (in an amusing future variant of America’s Most Wanted that panders explicitly to bounty hunters), but they also know how to twist a few arms and prod the right people to find out who’s worth bringing in.

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Champloo, in the Okinawan language, is a kind of stew with everything in the world in it, and who better than to brew up a stew of samurai movies and hip-hop attitude than Cowboy Bebop creator Shinichiro Watanabe? Bebop was about space-age technology fused with jazz-age attitude: in another century, Spike could have been a torpedo for the Chicago mob, and Faye Valentine his moll. Champloo takes samurai-movie conventions — elaborate swordfights, matters of honor, quests for vengeance — and adds graffiti and breakdancing and “b-boy” culture, but never in excess and in just the right ways so that what comes out is a blend and not a collision. This is a tough assignment to pull off but somehow they did it, and what came out feels like (to quote Harlan Ellison) an explosion in a fresh-air factory.

If cultural influences don’t mean a thing to you, they don’t have to. Above and beyond the list of ingredients, Champloo is terrific entertainment — funny, fast-moving, great to look at, and compelling enough that when it’s over you want to go back for more. No knowledge of samurai-movie conventions is really needed, but if you’re curious, watch it now and then come back to it later after you’ve checked out Zatoichi and Lone Wolf and Cub, and see if you see things differently. What they are doing here is not mocking or kidding samurai movies (that would be easy, and has been done to death) but taking the standard-issue pieces that most of them use and putting them back together in an unexpected way. (I was going to say remixing, but if you watch the show that term pretty much suggests itself.)