BLUE EYE SAMURAI

Amber Noizumi and Michael Green have made an animated revenge story set in Edo-period Japan, and given it a hero whose face is a crime. Mizu (Maya Erskine) has blue eyes, which in this country means one of her parents was a foreigner, which means she should not exist. She keeps them hidden, passes as a man, and carries a list of men she means to kill. Eight episodes, released on 3 November 2023, carrying a certificate 18 it has earned by the end of the first hour. The sword fights are the best animated action we have seen in years. The conversations between them are not as good, and that is the review in two sentences.

Start with the fights, because the series does. The animation builds its people as three-dimensional models and then draws over them so they look painted, and the result moves like a cartoon and bleeds like a film. Seven directors are credited, Green among them, and the style holds across all of them. Editors Yuka Shirasuna and Brad Lee Zimmerman cut the action so that you always know where the blade is and whose arm is attached to it. A fight in the first episode, Mizu against a crowd of swordsmen and then their best man, Taigen (Darren Barnet), is staged as one long problem she solves a step at a time, and by the end of it we knew where every body had fallen.

We flinched more than once, which we do not often do at a drawing. The series does it by treating a cut as something that happens to a person: the blade goes in, and the camera stays on the face a beat longer than is comfortable. Later, and to our surprise, we were moved. The series stops the road for most of an episode to show us where Mizu came from, with hardly any fighting in it, and the stillness made the story sadder than another fight would have. It is the best half-hour in the series.

Erskine plays Mizu low and flat, a voice that decided long ago not to want anything it cannot cut its way to, and lets almost nothing through. Kenneth Branagh is Abijah Fowler, and the name tells you he is not from here; Branagh plays him with relish, a soft voice that makes threats sound like hospitality, and he is the only person in the series who seems to be enjoying himself. Masi Oka’s Ringo, who attaches himself to Mizu and will not be shaken off, is warm without tipping into mascot. George Takei, as Seki, is dry and lovely in a small part. Randall Park’s Heiji Shindo gets the laughs. Brenda Song’s Akemi has the hardest job, because her strand starts slowly and takes three episodes to find its reason to be there.

Toby Wilson and Jason William Scheier, the production designers, give the country snow that stays white for about four seconds, timber towns the colour of tea, and a brothel lit in red and gold that looks like the inside of a lacquer box. Suttirat Anne Larlarb’s costumes do a lot with one idea: Mizu’s hat and dark coat make a silhouette you could find in a crowd of a thousand, which is the point, because she is hiding in one. Amie Doherty’s music is mostly percussion and low strings and has the good sense to drop out when the swords come up.

The talk is the trouble. Noizumi, Green and Yana Bille-Chung write dialogue that is clear and often funny, but a good deal of it sounds like modern Americans in period costume, and once or twice a line landed so flat that we were pulled out of the century. The revenge plot is a list, and a list tells you what will happen next. Fowler is a pleasure to listen to, but he wants what villains want, and we never learned why. The men around Mizu, Taigen most of all, are drawn with less care than she is.

Set beside the films it owes a debt to, Lady Snowblood (1973) and the Kill Bill pictures, it stands up. Watch this one in the evening, with the lights down, and not while eating.