Rihards Online

What a great ride of emotions it has been watching Samurai Champloo. Yes, it’s an anime for those of you who didn’t know. It’s a great anime to put it simply. It’s set in its own version of Edo period Japan. The anime is a mix of action, adventure and comedy. It tells the story of Fuu(the woman in the picture) who with the help of her two bodyguards sets out on a search for a samurai who smells of sunflowers.

Samurai Champloo was directed and authored by Shinichiro Watanabe, the man who is responsible for bringing us Cowboy Bebop. So my expectations were quite high for this anime. Not only did the anime meet my expectations, it also easily beat them. The story is well written, and the action sequences are drawn very well. But best of all is the music. While not everybody is going to be a fan of predominantly hip-hop soundtrack, especially in a show that is set in the age of samurai, I think it worked out quite well in the end.

The three main characters each have their own backgrounds, and dark secrets, which are unravelled slowly as the anime progresses. Even though it’s definitely an adult anime, it doesn’t come short of comedy, there were virtually no episode where I didn’t laugh(yes, there are some really serious episodes, with drama that matches, and even beats, that of Battlestar Galactica).

My favourite comedy bit has got to be the human beatboxes, it’s weird at first when you see them, but then it’s really funny, oh yeah and the graffiti artists were quite good too. There are 26 episodes, so you can probably watch it all in one day. Highly recommended for anyone who likes anime, or samurai action.

After watching quite a lot of Naruto, and then Bleach, I realised that I’d like to watch a grown up anime instead. Don’t get me wrong, both Naruto and Bleach are great animes, and an excellent way to spend some free time, but both of them are aimed at children and young people. So I had a quick look at what else has been released over the past few years and was aimed more at grown ups.

Black Lagoon is definitely the answer to that. An anime for grown ups doesn’t mean that it’s all serious and that there is no humour, far from it actually, there’s plenty of humour in Black Lagoon. But what makes it for grown ups, is the setting, the concepts and ideas, as well as problems that they handle, and of course specifically in Black Lagoon’s case, all the violence that comes with the place and storyline that it is set in.

Another interesting thing about the series is that it doesn’t draw a line of what is morally right or wrong. Instead it shows the situation, or the problem from different perspectives, because of what the main characters are. Be it a tough, murdering gun(wo)man or a caring person who does not want to kill.

I’m not going to spoil anything by saying what’s it about, other than it is about a group of mercenaries who sometimes brush against the law to do their job as delivery men. So I’ll just say that you should go out and get it instead, it’s well worth it. And as with almost every other anime, the original Japanese version with English subtitles is a lot better than the English dubbed version.