Samurai Champloo

[Dracos]

Samurai Champloo is the latest work of the same group that did Cowboy Bebop.  In similar style, it is a mixture of story telling, music, drama and comedy.  The thematics this time are hip-hop, portrayed through samurai in ancient Japan.

 The story follows a young girl and her two body guards, both remarkable swordsman of about equal skill and vastly different attitudes who she saved from execution.  The young girl convinces them to help her on a journey to find a 'samurai who smells of sunflower seeds'.  Currently, it's about 24 episodes through.

 the anime has a lot of good points.  It's animation is solid and when it does have battles, they're pretty good.  The characters aren't half bad either making it pretty enjoyable to watch.

On the other hand it has a ton of stupid filler.  The entire actual plot episodes are maybe six in a twenty-six episode series.  the filler usually ranges between mediocre to 'shut this off and destroy the dvd', well drawn or not.  The hip-hop, far from adding to the experience, really feels awkward and misplaced, just being odd whenever it showed up and often being used to expand a five minute sequence into an entire episode.

The combat scenes, while usually rocking feel barely there and are clearly not the focus.

The overall plot also suffers from convulutedness.  Perhaps later it will be revealed what's going on and there's hints, but in the end, it really feels just sort of off.  I mean, the main source of conflict later in the series is the government following this little girl to find her old father and sending super uber assassins after her.  It sort of just comes in a rush at the end without any real lead up.  The last few episodes are looking quite promising, and may make  watching it this long worth it.

Whatever you do, I suggest skipping episode 23 in it's entirety.  Of all the fillers, it qualifies itself as the worst and completely not worth the twenty minutes it takes to watch it, much less the money to pay for it.

I'm not sure if I'd recommend it personally yet.  The first and last episodes are looking to be the best and with a few choice exceptions, the rest of the anime isn't worth the time it takes to watch.  Really quite a shame with how much potential for really cool combat scenes it hinted at with the first episode.

Dracos

[thepanda]

On the other hand it has a ton of stupid filler.  The entire actual plot episodes are maybe six in a twenty-six episode series.
Dracos

That about sums up Cowboy Bebop, too. Between Jupiter Jazz, The real Folk Blues, the intro episode, Fey's intro, and Ed's intro that about covers the whole plot. The rest is filler. Godd filler, but filler.

[Dracos]

Yes.  But I wouldn't really call most of this good filler.

Dracos

[Dracos]

The ending...well...

Meh.  It was better than most, but didn't really satisify me.  Mugen, in particular, feels like he was just swatted down from the powerhouse he was earlier in the series to a guy who just gets whammied all over the place.  Poorly choegraphed for the most part.

Technically cool...  but not up to bebop's level.  For a stylistic piece, it just really didn't work for me, as a story piece, it worked, but it really worked way too hard for what it gave, and finally as an action piece, Fifteen minutes over the whole series succeeded and the rest just was 'there'.

Dracos