Last Sunday, the Physicist and I finished watching Samurai Champloo. Overall, I really enjoyed it, though, like many anime, it suffered from a craptastic ending.
Champloo is set in a fictionalized version of Edo-period Japan that borrows heavily from modern life (e.g. there’s baseball and hip-hop culture). Ordinarily, the historical anachronism would bother me to no end, but, in the context of the story, they work. The plot follows a fifteen year old girl named Fuu and the two roving samurai, Jin and Mugen, who accompany her on her quest to find the Samurai Who Smells of Sunflowers.
But the quest for the Sunflower Samurai isn’t actually that important, and most of the series is about the journey itself and the trio’s adventures along the way. The series is well written and, unlike a lot of other anime characters, the characters in Champloo develop a bit over the course of the series.
My only real objection to the series is the ending. The writers pulled some random villains out of left field to fight the heroes and the result is thoroughly unsatisfying. There are also a number of WTF moments that left me scratching my head. But overall, I really enjoyed Champloo and I’d give it a final grade of A-.
Codex Lochianus 