Samurai Champloo

I was at Best Buy one time checking out the anime section, there I found Samurai Champloo for sale. I am a big fan of samurai anime so I took a look at it. Two things made me want to buy it: the dream team of director Shinchiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop & The Animatrix), designers Kazuto Nakazawa (Kill Bill Vol. 1: Chapter 3: The Origin of O-Ren), and Mahiro Maeda (Last Exile & Blue Submarine No. 6), and an awesome, hard-hitting hip hop soundtrack! There aren't many animes that have rap soundtracks, so I had to check this out. Samurai Champloo is one of the best new animes. Brilliant animation, memorable characters, laid-back kinetic atmosphere, great music, and kick-ass Hong Kong, Akira Kurosawa style fight sequences. The story revolves around two highly skilled ronins and a girl: Mugen, a violent, buck wild swordsman whose style emphasizes one hand kendo and Capoeira. Jin, a mysterious, calm gentleman swordsman that masters traditional, straight-forward Japanese Swordsmanship. And Fuu, a young, beautiful ditzy waitress. After Fuu saves them from being executed, Mugen and Jin agree to temporarily set aside their differences and help her in her quest to find the "samurai who smells of sunflowers. Jin and Mugen are the perfect examples of the yin-yang concept. These unstoppable, independent warriors are complete opposites, but their skills are equal to each other. Fuu plays a perfect mediator between the two. This series has strong ties to Watanabe's previous classic, Cowboy Bebop: same style action and atmosphere, but with a hip-hop soundtrack instead of Jazz. And Mugen, Jin, and Fuu could be compared to Spike, Jet, and Faye. But what makes this series original is the hybrid combination of a feudal Japan setting and philosophy with modern fighting, urban street flavor personality, and off-beat comedy, hence the title "Champloo", meaning stir-fry. The verbal exchanges between the three heroes are amusing and great to watch. They series also utilize rap DJ record style scratching to switch between scenes perfectly. Overall, Samurai Champloo is an anime bond to be a classic, and raises the level for anime. If you are a major anime fan, check this out, it will be an excellent addition to a collection.

***** (5 stars) Ryojin20 favorite!

This anime tells the obscure story of 2 samurai bound to a girl on a quest for a samurai who smells of sunflowers. She constantly conceals her motiviation for doing so.

The comedy element in this anime is excellent. A deliberate pairing comparable to Spike and Jet in cowboy beebop exists with one vagabond samurai and one honorable samurai. Both samurai have a completely contrasting fighting style which makes for great action scenes and simultaneous plots (where one is fighting on one side of a city and another is fighting on the other).

Similar plot style to cowboy beebop, via meetings with people from their past, both characters pasts are slowly revealed with a clear direction toward finding the samurai who smells of sunflowers. There's a constant struggle to find the basic necessities like food and a real feel to the plot as opposed to anime where you're left wondering if they've gone six months without a shower or a bath.

As i said, best anime i've ever scene, hilarious :D

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 similarities with Bebop end at the fact that the series has 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 story lines are from one another.

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

Mugen is a fairly dim, self-taught swordsman who doesn't know how to hold back, Jin is the perfect samurai: cold, calculating, every move flawless. They could be no more different, and in fact one would gladly kill the other with the chance, but they are both reluctantly recruited by the ditsy teahouse waitress Fuu after she saves them from execution.

Samurai champloo is the story of Mugen, Jin and Fuu, as they journey across Japan trying to find "The samurai who smells of sunflowers." All the way they meet all sorts of people, get into trouble, and try to make money. As the show progresses, the mysteries of the characters pasts are slowly revealed.

Samurai champloo is an excellent series from the people who made Cowboy Bebop, the animated sequence in Kill Bill, and a few sequences in the Animatrix. The music is good, offering a wide variety of genres, the animation is excellent, and the dialog is kept to a bare minimum. Oh, and the comedy is great, too.

If you liked Cowboy Bebop, you will probably like Samurai Champloo. One's set in the future and has a lot of jazz music, the other's set long ago in Japan and has a lot of rap in the scene transitions. But the character types in both are pretty much the same, and in both the characters must come to terms with themselves. I recommend it to fans of this genre of anime.

With 1998's "Cowboy Bebop", one of the most acclaimed anime TV series ever (go read the comments index for it here on IMDb if you don't believe me!), Shinichiro Watanabe became a creative force to watch out for. The innovative energy, drama and beauty of "Bebop" are carried forward in his second original series, "Samurai Champloo". Fans have been quick to look for similarities between "Bebop" and "Champloo" (even the titles have clear parallels), and it's true there are some: the assembly-of-rootless-loners cast of characters, the dramatic and cinematic visual style, and especially the importance and integration of music into the storytelling mix--in SC's case, everything from hip-hop beatboxing to Ainu and Okinawan folksong. But "Champloo"'s differences from "Bebop" are much more interesting than its likenesses. "Bebop" is drenched in melancholy and regret, dreams of the lost past and the future that couldn't be. "Champloo" is all about facing the future, the wave of change, the onrush of history that can't be stopped, and how three kids from widely diverse backgrounds--not even friends when they set out-- find themselves right on the crest of that wave. We're in Edo Period Japan; since 1638 the Tokugawa Shogunate has banned contact with all countries except China and Japan, a ban that lasted two centuries. The outside world can't be kept outside forever. Even the long-respected samurai class is losing its power, and there's restlessness in the land plus accompanying pressure from the Shogunate on all sides. Through this uneasy landscape (rendered in lushly beautiful watercolors that might remind you of Miyazaki) wander our cast of characters: outlaw ronin Jin, a gifted swordsman, stoic, disciplined and heartbreakingly gorgeous, devoted to the bushido code but exiled for killing his sensei; Okinawan wild-boy Mugen, orphan, former pirate and brilliant innovator, whose fighting style mixes everything from Brazilian capoeira to break-dancing, and whose feral-child innocence faces the toughest tests in the series; and teahouse waitress Fuu, spunky, compassionate and packing a lot of secrets, who rescues the two swordsmen from the executioner's block and enlists them on her quest to avenge her mother's death. On their long walk from Edo to Nagasaki they'll see a lot, face a lot of trials, starve, quarrel, save each other's lives, break up, re-bond, and become inseparable. Except that Jin and Mugen still swear they'll fight to the death one day, and no one (not even Fuu) is saying anything about the Sunflower Samurai, the object of Fuu's quest.

Have I made this sound like a straight historical drama? I ought to mention that it can be hysterically funny as well as vividly bloody, contains knockout fight scenes and anachronisms by the carload (the aforementioned break dancing and beatboxing, Jin's Armani glasses, the appearance of landmarks not built till the 1900s...), has made me cry more times than any anime since "Bebop", and has sharp things to say about the heavy hand of authority and tradition on groups as diverse as gay men, married women, foreigners, aboriginal natives and illegal aliens. It's unfailingly beautiful to look at (well, 95% unfailingly) and listen to, delectably well-written, and simply brilliant. When it gets to America, go find it.