The animated series, a historical drama with a modern sensibility, stuns from the first frame.
Early last month, and with minimal fanfare, Netflix released all eight episodes of the first season of the animated action series Blue Eye Samurai. Following a sudden and almost entirely organic rise in popularity, the show was renewed for a second season. Even the rock-star video-game designer Hideo Kojima was posting about it. Blue Eye Samurai is more than worth the hype: It deserves to be counted among the best shows of the year. The series takes the trappings of a heroic action-adventure and turns them on their head, crafting a bloody, emotional drama that is riveting from the very first frame.
Created by Michael Green (who co-wrote Logan and Blade Runner 2049) and Amber Noizumi, the show follows Mizu, a half-white, half-Japanese woman who stalks the countryside of Edo-period Japan, passing as a man in a wide hat and hiding her blue eyes behind tinted glasses. In the 17th century, the ruling Tokugawa shogunate closed its borders to the outside world and outlawed the presence of foreigners, the first episode explains. Mizu’s blue-eyed appearance is living evidence of the foreigners’ influence, seen by others as a physical defect of possible supernatural or demonic origin. She searches for four white men who secretly remain in Japan, manipulating trade and politics from inside their hidden fortresses.
Though Mizu (voiced by Maya Erskine) would much prefer to travel alone, she picks up a few stragglers along the way: Ringo (Masi Oka), a large, friendly, handless cook who dreams of becoming a warrior like Mizu; Akemi (Brenda Song), the daughter of an ambitious lord, who rebels against her father’s plans of marrying her off to build his own power; and Taigen (Darren Barnet), an accomplished dojo champion who vows to duel Mizu to the death after she humiliates him in combat. The white man Mizu hunts in Season 1, an Irishman named Abijah Fowler (Kenneth Branagh), is working alongside the merchant Heiji Shindo (Randall Park) to upend the ruling powers of Japan by illegally smuggling in a devastating Western weapon.
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If that sounds like the setup to a Game of Thrones spin-off, Blue Eye Samurai definitely has that vibe: sweeping in scope and intimate in detail, set in a period of technological and social upheaval, when the ancient traditions of honorable combat are being eroded by jealous warmongering. Green and Noizumi have cited Akira Kurosawa’s films and Clint Eastwood’s Dollars trilogy as influences, as well as a much more personal connection: Noizumi got the idea after the birth of her and Green’s daughter, who is also mixed-race with blue eyes.
To say that the show is so good that you forget it’s not live-action would be an insult to the stunning animation, every frame of which is carefully choreographed and colored. The series uses the hybrid-animation style that other Netflix shows (Arcane, The Dragon Prince) have experimented with before, but never has it looked as good as it does here. Inspired by the studied opulence and detail of Japanese murals, Blue Eye Samurai keeps to a spare color palette of whites, blacks, blues, and reds, appropriate for its tales of snow, fire, and blood. A scene where two characters anticipate each other’s movements during a duel is made to look like an ink-wash painting in motion. A later episode emulates the style of a Bunraku puppet show to dramatize another character’s tragic backstory. The style leaves plenty of room for realism, though: When any unfortunate background character gets sliced through the middle, you watch his guts plop out.
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The subject matter is mature not just in content—most episodes feature either nudity or theatrical blood spatter, or both—but also in theme, deftly pulling together ideas about honor, female empowerment, and the necessity of violence, while weaving in appropriate historical context. Mizu straddles many divides. The opposing relations between white Europeans and native Japanese manifest in her dual race. The gender she is and the gender she pretends to be often directly contradict each other. As a female bushi, she hews close to traditional samurai values while directly contradicting the core tenet that true warriors have always been, and must always be, male. (It’s also worth noting that, although the characters of the time wouldn’t have the same language for it that we do now, the show has left plenty of room for a nonbinary reading of Mizu’s gender, which often goes unspecified.)
Mizu is not an archetypal girlboss, and neither is Akemi, though both of them, as well as other, more minor female characters, learn what it means to use their gender as a weapon and a tool. A show in which a woman disguises herself as a man in order to be taken seriously—or spoken to at all—Blue Eye Samurai analyzes the thorny relationships between men and women. Multiple episodes take place within a brothel, where sex is a job and also a way to wield power and influence. To navigate a world dominated by men, anyone who is not a man (or, in Ringo’s case, not an able-bodied man) must learn how to play the game better than the men can.
Blue Eye Samurai also interrogates the cost of violence, and the psychological toll of a life dedicated to the killing of one’s enemies. The show toes the line between stylish action scenes where characters perform one-armed handstands to dodge attacks and sober moments where the wounds, both physical and mental, are visible. Mizu often feels doomed to succumb to the demonic influence her blue eyes betray, trapped in the void between who she is and who she wishes she could be. Blue Eye Samurai finds its footing in the push-pull between opposing forces, the gray area between identities—a balancing act on an edge as sharp as a knife.
Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai Is a Bloody Masterpiece
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21.12.2023
The animated series, a historical drama with a modern sensibility, stuns from the first frame.
Early last month, and with minimal fanfare, Netflix released all eight episodes of the first season of the animated action series Blue Eye Samurai. Following a sudden and almost entirely organic rise in popularity, the show was renewed for a second season. Even the rock-star video-game designer Hideo Kojima was posting about it. Blue Eye Samurai is more than worth the hype: It deserves to be counted among the best shows of the year. The series takes the trappings of a heroic action-adventure and turns them on their head, crafting a bloody, emotional drama that is riveting from the very first frame.
Created by Michael Green (who co-wrote Logan and Blade Runner 2049) and Amber Noizumi, the show follows Mizu, a half-white, half-Japanese woman who stalks the countryside of Edo-period Japan, passing as a man in a wide hat and hiding her blue eyes behind tinted glasses. In the 17th century, the ruling Tokugawa shogunate closed its borders to the outside world and outlawed the presence of foreigners, the first episode explains. Mizu’s blue-eyed appearance is living evidence of the foreigners’ influence, seen by others as a physical defect of possible supernatural or demonic origin. She searches for four white men who secretly remain in Japan, manipulating trade and politics from inside their hidden fortresses.
Though Mizu (voiced by Maya Erskine)........
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