What happens when you give an animation studio like GONZO 1 million dollars per episode? A very pretty, but equally empty series like Afro Samurai. Airing on Spike TV of all places, Afro Samurai is basically a short and bloody cash-in on the Samurai Champloo formula with none of the charm. The fights are beautiful and great fun, but everything else is the horrible crap you’d expect from a direct-to-dub anime.
While some of the voices are actually quite passable, including Samuel L. Jackson, others are downright awful. Every possible stereotype of both East and West is thrown in, just so nobody feels left out. Whoever wrote the dialog and cast the characters couldn’t have put even a moment’s thought into what the show would actually look like. The disconnect is just huge. Easily the worst VA and dialog is the smack talking ninja sidekick of Afro Samurai. Stick an Eddy Murphy sound-a-like in and I guess it’s suddenly suppose to be funny. Nearly equally bad is the head preacher of the Empty Seven, whose TV Evangelical lines are just completely out of place with the animation.
Afro Samurai is just a cliche story wrapped in beautiful art with bottom of the barrel writing and voice work. It’s worth watching just to see what Gonzo can do with a million dollars per episode, but you may want to mute the sound. It’s still fun if you simply don’t expect much. The anime community will tear this apart, while everyone else will forget it. It’s basically a Gonzo animation tech demo.
