Samurai Champloo - Volume 1 + Series Box

Rating:
Summary: SaMuRaI ChAmPlOo
Review: First off, the animation in this movie is top-of-the-line. Also, the fight scene with Mugen and Jin in the tea house is one of my favorites when it comes to anime. The "Battle Cry" intro is also pretty cool and stylish. The characters are strange and likeable. Although the anime loses steam after a while and then picks back up, it's still a great experience. So, if you like action animes and want to see something new and interesting, this is one anime that should be in your collection.

Rating:
Summary: Stylish genre- and era-bending action from Watanabe
Review: Samurai Champloo is the long-awaited next project from Cowboy Bebop director Shinichiro Watanabe. His two short films in the Animatrix compilation (Kid's Story and Detective Story) give American audiences a sneak peek at the phenomenal art style of this series, but they barely hint at the jaw-dropping action and unorthodox blend of history and music contained therein.

The first four episodes of Champloo introduce its three protagonists: the vagrant swordsman Mugen, the rogue samurai Jin, and the tea-shop waitress Fuu. This unlikely and volatile trio begin a road journey through post-shogunate Japan (ca. 1780), brought together by circumstances best seen to be believed.

"Champloo" means mixed-up or stir-fry, and that's what this series is: a stylish blend of old school values and situations, meshed with more modern sensibilities, fighting styles, and visual design. Over the lush, dynamic art, a soundtrack of some of the best hip-hop from modern Japan plays. Though it's a noticeable device in the first few episodes, it doesn't take long before the music feels like second nature despite the anachronism.

Champloo is many things: a mature drama, an action series, an uproariously funny comedy and a visual feast. Watanabe-san demonstrates here that the success of Cowboy Bebop was uniquely his, and no fluke - fans of that series will not be disappointed, despite how radically different the two storylines are from one another.

As the first title card of the first episode of Samurai Champloo says, "Just shut up and watch."

Rating:
Summary: Innovative, kickass anime
Review: There's just nothing out there like Samurai Champloo. Created, directed and masterminded by the brilliant Shinichiro Watanabe, it uses hip-hop the way his classic "Cowboy Bebop" uses bebop jazz--not so much as soundtrack music, but as a motif and a defining overall style. Flavored with sassy anachronisms, Champloo is nonetheless set in the last gasp of the era of Samurai Japan, when the boundaries are breaking down on all sides, and three stray-cat kids--a teahouse waitress with a secret, a quiet and deadly ronin with a dark crime in his past, and a tattooed wild boy from Ryuukyuu with a lot to learn--meet and form an alliance none of them expected. Their quest: to find the Sunflower Samurai, for reasons only Fuu (the waitress) knows. Their problem; in their initial battle, neither Jin (the cool elegant ronin) nor Mugen (the island wildboy) was able to so much as scratch the other, and thus was born a vow that neither is allowed to die at the hands of anyone else--forming a strange protective alliance that might even be a friendship. Who knows?
In episodes 3/4 they end up on opposite sides of a yakuza war; they have a long way to go. I promise if you watch this DVD you will want the rest; the visual techniques are outstandingly state-of-the-art, the synch of music and action is top-notch, and Jin and Mugen's swordfight in the teahouse is one of the coolest ever, anywhere, I mean it.

Rating:
Summary: Decent but lacking
Review: This anime starts out really really cool. I liked the animation style and the colors. The problem with this anime though is that it gets old really fast. Most all the episodes I saw had the travelers stumbling into a town hungry, pawning weapons for food, acting out the plot, then earning their weapons back. It happened over and over again without ever furthering the story. I could'nt really take it any more. Also, beatboxing breakdancing samurai is kinda pushin it. There are much better samurai animes out there.