The Ultimate Samurai Revenge Anime Is A One-Of-A-Kind Experience

Afro Samurai was written and illustrated by Takashi Okazaki, and if you haven’t seen the manga or series before, there’s a good chance you still know his work, as he was a designer for Batman Ninja, the anime Ninja Kumai and “The Duel” episode of Star Wars Visions. He has a very distinct style that’s, as he’s explained, heavily influenced by soul food and hip-hop.

I’ll admit, the series, which only runs for five episodes, doesn’t break any new ground, but what it does do is take the standard tropes and story beats and present them in a slick package.

Afro’s father is Number One, but he loses a duel to Justice in front of young Afro, with the demented cowboy duelist telling the young boy that his life will now be consumed by a quest for revenge. It’s very similar to the first duel in Kill Bill, except we jump forward to adult Afro, now sporting the Number Two headband, as he craves a bloody path of violence across the countryside to scale the mountain and face Justice.

Afro Samurai might have the simplest plot of any anime I’ve ever watched, but it’s an absolute blast from start to finish.

Thanks to the slick animation, each duel looks like it’s from a music video, and given who did the soundtrack for Afro Samurai, you could watch it only as a long-form Wu-Tang Clan music video. RZA produced the soundtrack, which is filled with different genres of hip-hop and drum-heavy instrumentals that manage somehow to capture the feeling of a classic samurai duel while being unlike anything else, going past the old standard set by Samurai Champloo.

Given how influenced the Wu-Tang Clan has been by anime from the very beginning, laying down tracks for a series is the natural conclusion to a decade of work.

For once, I can also say to watch the dubbed version instead of the subtitles, as Afro Samurai has an A-list English voice cast, headlined by Samuel L. Jackson, who helped bring the series to America in the first place. Jackson voices both Afro and his eccentric mentor, Ninja Ninja (for whom he uses his regular voice), and he’s joined by Ron Perlman, Mark Hamill, X-Men 2’s Kelly Hu, Lucy Liu, Tara Strong (Miss Minutes from Loki), John DiMaggio (Futurama’s Bender), Phil LaMarr, Dwight Schultz, and notable anime regulars, Yuri Lowenthal (Naruto) and Steve Blum (Cowboy Bebop).

REVIEW SCORE

Again, the plot is simple, as it really is nothing more than a quest for revenge that begins and ends exactly how you’d expect, but Afro Samurai is all about the journey and not the cliche destination. On that end, it’s a feast for the eyes and ears, and you might even go back and watch a few fights multiple times to catch all the small details and appreciate how the music and animation synch together.

You can catch Afro Samurai on Crunchyroll, and when you’re done, enjoy the sequel movie, Afro Samurai: Resurrection, which I didn’t think was quite as good, but at under two hours, it’s still a great way to kill a lazy afternoon.