Hello everyone, in this lesson we are gonna be diving into a historical type of anime with Samurai Champloo! It is a great anime with great music, animation, and a different style of narration portraying a lot of hip hop style of environments and music.
This story is set in the Edo-era that is Japan 1600 to half of 1800. So we get to see this type of environment plus some samurais fight, adventures, and comedy as well. So our story is about Fuu a young woman who accidentally ends up meeting two swordsmen Mugen and Jin who save her from some trouble and they end up accidentally killing someone important so are to be executed till Fuu saves them and she asks the two of them to help her find "the samurai that smells like sunflowers", and of course none of them wants to because they want to fight each other first to see who is the best swordsman but they end up tossing a coin to decide an so they end up accompanying this girl on her journey.
So this is in general what this the story is about but while having this journey as the main objective of the story we also have little stories and different adventures every chapter giving us a lot of different characters and showing a variety of aspects of that historical period while also offering a lot of comedy, action and a bit of randomness with no big dramas or heavy feelings overall.
For the three main characters, I really liked them a lot, for starters they actually are all broke and don't like each other at all at first but they start getting used to it. So first we have Fuu who is the girl that brings the group together in the first place, she is pretty and kind of funny, is also really energetic, clumsy, and straightforward. On the other hand, Mugen is a free-spirited swordsman who is really simple-minded, just goes around relaxing, eating when he cans and getting into trouble. And lastly, Jin who is a ronin, which is a wandering samurai, is really disciplined, the few words type of man, intelligent and calm.
So as I said before this anime shows some things of the era, like clothing, social status, art, and things of the sort and it also has some mystery along the way since it gets in more complex situations regarding assassins, clans, and religions. The manga was written by Masaru Gotsubo and the anime was produced by Manglobe studio. I have to say that I like the type of art of the story and how it matches the historical context and modern hip-hop vibes at the same. The colors are not really bright or vivid they actually look kind of old or washed out, so it gives this old world atmosphere but also the street hip hop atmosphere which is emphasized by the music and the rhythms throughout the story which brings me to the next point the music. The music in this anime is one of the things that makes it really unique with lo-fi hip-hop style, is really chill like going with the flow of things and not just in the story itself but also the music for the opening which is Battlecry by Nujabes ft Shing02 is so cool, with great bit and also the format of the opening is great like it introduces every character perfectly. And finally, the story is really easy going there are not really big dramas till we reach the final part of the story and the ending of it was also really nice and clean, just as easy going and fluent as the story in general.
So this was everything for this lesson for this amazing anime, more than anything I hope you enjoy this lesson and look forward to the next one. Thank you for listening and talk to you later. Bye-bye.
