Afro Samurai: Season 1 Director's Cut is a traditional tale of a lone ronin wandering the countryside of a weird techno-feudal Japan, searching for the man who killed his father. Oh, and he's black.
Hip hop culture has long embraced the kung-fu and gangster genres for their violence and hypermasculinity (e.g. veneration of Scarface, the Wu Tang Clan), who have in turn incorporated African-American motifs into their work (The Matrix films, lamentable blackface music acts in Japan) for a perceived infusion of soul/cool.
Afro Samurai is a more successful example of this latter trend and has been called blaxploitation in Japan, but is probably better described as Golden Harvest takes a walk through the ghetto. As the producer himself notes in one of the extras, this is not a 50/50 arrangement, but more like 95/5. Almost everything about this production is seen-it-before masterless swordsman fare, with the unexplained caveat that this one happens to be of a persuasion to have the promised afro for the animators to have some fun with, which bears the same resemblance to a real 'fro that Goku or Cloud Strife's polygonal explosions do to an actual unruly surfer mop. Plus, a bad guy or two seems to have gone to pimp school and discovered the joys of perpetually grooving with his headphones or having some hos lolling around to lick his face while he plots.
At the outset, young Afro (later voiced by SAMUEL L. MOTHERFUCKIN' JACKSON, Snakes on a Plane, etc., etc.) sees his father engage in a duel with a sinister western gunfighter slitheringly voiced by Ron Perlman (Hellboy). It seems Afro Sr. wears the #1 headband signifying the greatest warrior in the world, and the gunfighter wears #2, meaning he is the only fighter in the world with the right to challenge him. The duel does not go well for the Afro family, which is why young Afro finds himself wandering the earth years later accompanied by a mysterious and intensely annoying ninja-clad hanger-on (whose Big Reveal you might see coming), wearing the #2 band and dealing with endless yahoos who want to take it off him for the right to challenge #1. Each of the five half-hour episodes advances the current action and tells more of his backstory detailing how he came to earn the right to wear #2 himself, and why some of his opponents (most notably the one who looks like he learned his dual-sword style in the Hundred-Acre Wood) bear special significance for him.
The mash-up of styles and settings shows up in other ways besides the main character and villain. Afro Samurai brings taciturn death to everyone from standard sword gangs to a robot who copied his fighting style when a spy downloaded Afro's dreams into her cell phone, to a guy with a rapid-fire crossbow to a monk who carries a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in his wood-frame backpack.
The voice talent is solid, and the animation is generally of high quality, and appropriate for what is being shown. The overall style seems somewhat reminiscent of Ghost in the Shell, or even more The Boondocks, and in fact the whole thing could be explained as a dream Huey might have had after falling asleep watching a Kurosawa marathon. The plot is intricate, but in many cases the writers failed to make clear certain aspects of it for those not already familiar with the story. For example, the gunfighter's name is apparently Justice, and at some point in the past he was mutated by radiation, which has a lot to do with how he was apparently able to decapitate a man with a pair of sixguns. And who is the crippled mad scientist who designs all these high-tech villains? These important elements and a few others are only fully understood if you watch the extras or read the manga. The artwork is freeform enough that some details they try to reveal visually can just be taken as stylistic excess.
Extras
Character profiles and interviews with the voice actors, the very hands-on producer, and the author of the original work, which is well worth watching to help understand what you just saw. The RZA also shows up to talk a little about his wholly appropriate authorship of the original score.
Highlights
A.S. pausing in his single-minded quest for revenge long enough to put his mack down so hard on an assassin with a tragic past that she decides not to kill him. Must have been steamy in the studio when Kelly Hu (Lady Deathstrike in X2) recorded that bit.
Presentation
The main feature is in 1080p HD with Dolby 5.1 "TrueHD" Digital audio. The extras are in 480i standard.
ComicsOnline gives Afro Samurai Season 1 Director's Cut 3 out of 5 lengthy flashback sequences that explain just who the latest person is who has only seconds to live anyway.
TV MA. 125 min.
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