TwiddleGeek

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.

Perhaps slightly better than the first in terms of story, but that million dollars of budget still can’t manage to buy a decent transition from one scene to another. Everything is just a strange series of fade outs, probably so more connecting locations and scenes don’t have to be drawn. Who knows, maybe it’s a style choice.

At any rate, it’s nice to learn a little more about Afro’s backstory, and it was quite enjoyable. But dang do I really not care for that ninja sidekick. He’s just so incredibly out of place and utterly annoying every chance he gets. Who’s ever idea it was to put a “comedic” wisecracking ninja into such an otherwise stoic anime needs to be smacked around a bit.

To the wisecracking ninja sidekick: Shut the HELL UP! Seriously, this guy single handedly ruins a million dollars of animation by simply never shutting his loud mouth for longer than 15 seconds. And rap music during the big aerial fight scene? Come on. I really would like to know what this anime would have been like if Spike TV hadn’t had their hand in it. Really makes me wonder how anyone can defend dubs. Aside from wanting someone to shut the ninja up though, the fights are still as cool as ever. Afro fighting a robot version of himself had some very impressive, over the top scenes.

Things are getting a little heavy on the melodrama and light on the fighting, but at least the rest of the story is coming together. Rather ridiculous when a guy wearing a giant bear head says he can’t take a warrior with an afro seriously though. What is it with anime and people who should be dead, anyway? This kid gets stabbed multiple times, sliced, falls off a cliff, bounces off the jagged rocks a few times, lands in the ocean, and still lives to fight Afro years later? Good grief.