Samurai Jack
Note: this replaces an earlier, less comprehensive review from the previous year.
Created by Genndy Tartakovsky
Written by Genndy Tartakovsky, Bryan Andrews, Brian Larsen, Chris Reccardi, Darrick Bachman, Charlie Bean, Paul Rudish, Aaron Springer, Chris Mitchell & Erik Wiese
Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky, Randy Myers, Robert Alvarez, Rob Renzetti, Chris Savino
Voices of Phil LaMarr, Mako Iwamatsu (seasons 1–4), Greg Baldwin (season 5)
Long ago, in a distant land, Genndy Tartakovsky decided he wanted to make cartoons. So he moved to America, and joined the Cartoon Network. A unique and gifted talent, he rose through the ranks and in 1997, created his own show, Dexter’s Lab. The show was sly, silly, and snarky, and featured the oddest protagonist in cartoons, with the strangest accent. Sort of a cross between Peter Lorre and Peter Sellers.
But Tartakovsky had in mind a cartoon with a character like the ones in the David Carradine Kung-Fu movies. A skilled warrior, dedicated to fighting evil and absolutely incorruptible.
A Samurai warrior fitted the bill, but he didn’t want a Kurosawa samurai. His was to be clean cut, attired in a simple, elegant white hitatare (known in the Scottish highlands as “pajamas”), and armed only with his wits, his training, and the obligatory magic katana. Japanese clogs and a straw hat completed the ensemble, and the unnamed time-traveling warrior dubbed “Samurai Jack” was born.
The first Jack aired in August 2001, and was an instant sensation. At you might expect from a cartoon aimed at the prepubescent crowd, it could be goofy, and even silly. Black and white ethics were clearly delineated. And while Jack could dispatch up to a dozen adversaries with a single swing of his katana (and thousands over the course of the show) it was entirely bloodless. His opponents were either ghosts (who dissolved in a puff of smoke) or, more frequently, robots. These would die with great gushings of what appeared to be motor oil, followed for no apparent reason, by an explosion—a gout of red flame and noisome black smoke. Nor did the explosions affect Jack’s hearing; in one episode he battles three blind zen archers by blindfolding himself and emulating their preternatural powers of hearing.
But it was the other elements of the program that created attention from well outside the show’s targeted demographic.
First, there’s the amazing art. Designed/Painted by the legendary crew of Bill Wray, Dan Krall and Scott Willis, it’s often abstract, usually unique, and always beautiful. It sets tone and context in a way not seen outside of Studio Ghibli. The world of Aku (the antagonist, Jack’s nemesis whose evil is law and whose name is the Japanese word for evil) is mostly an industrial and emotional wasteland, a dystopia populated by all sorts of bizarre creatures and machines. Even the bleakest, most polluted scenes have their own strange beauty. The untouched and unspoiled areas are indescribably lovely. Some of the flashbacks to Jack’s life before Aku, featuring cultures and civilizations recognizably of our world, reflect a loving and stylistically appropriate rendering of those lands and their peoples.
Then there is the sound engineering. Not just the fight/action scenes, but the pastoral ones, where the sounds of nature are recreated so perfectly that David Attenborough would groan in envy. When snow falls, you hear the faint sibilant hiss.
You get to enjoy such subtleties because for a children’s cartoon, Samurai Jack is remarkably unhurried and contemplative. It’s not unusual for an episode to spend five whole minutes having Jack walk through the calmness of a winter forest, or riding across scorching sands on a strange desert beast with an alluring woman.
When it gets raucous, it pulls out all the stops. One of the few recurring characters is the Scotsman, a gleeful slander of all things Celtic. Episodes with him tend to be wildly funny, and the funniest episode of ANY show I’ve ever watched is the one in which we meet the Scotsman’s wife, still the only creature to make Jack quail in fear and flee.
Then, after four seasons, Cartoon Network, not recognizing the value of their property, pulled the plug on Samurai Jack, the main storyline of Jack’s efforts to return to the past to vanquish Aku, untold.
Over the years, the series remained alive through the internet and Youtube and torrents. A fanbase not only failed to dissipate, but grew in its insistence that somehow, the story of Jack be completed.
The series spent a decade in development hell, and rumors of movies, premium network series and even a live-action movie kept cropping up and withering. The fan base kept growing and becoming more insistent. Jack must find his way back.
Finally, Toonami, part of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming block, announced in 2016 that Jack would return for a fifth and final season.
Virtually everyone who worked on the original series over a decade before was willing to come back to a show that for many, was a capstone to their careers. The one exception was the incomparable Mako, voice of Aku (and General Iroh in the renowned Avatar series), who died. A worthy successor was found in the person of Greg Baldwin, who voiced Aku of the future, with archival footage of the original Mako footage voicing Aku of the past.
Season Five stands out from its predecessors. For one thing, it’s in a more mature time slot, so Tartakovsky is free to not only have actual bloodshed (one of the more haunting instants of the series is when Jack strikes down what he believes is just another Aku-spawned robot assassin, only to discover he has cut the throat of a young human woman. He has never killed a human before.), and a darker and more sophisticated palette of situations, sight gags and referents, but to make the story telling more sophisticated. Samurai Jack developed a story arc for the final season, something it did only rarely before, in two-part sequences.
The opening sequence both startled and left me at a loss. The normally clean shaven and immaculate samurai appears, clad in Daku Akuma Kachi Yoroi armor with a Sōmen daemon mask. He is riding a motorcycle of about15,000 cc, a howling Harleybeast that would make the most resolute Hell’s Angel consider retiring and take up crocheting. He comes in, guns blazing, bike outfitted with Ben Hur-spiked wheels. He hasn’t seen a razor in at least twenty years. He looks haggard.
He does battle with one of the most delightfully weird antagonists he’s faced, the guying and deadly flutist Scaramouche, and in the battle, his armor and his ride are destroyed. A subsequent battle with the Daughters of Aku leave him beaten and bleeding copiously, reduced to a breechclout, too tired to even feel the guilt and despair that has taken control of his life in the fifty years he has battled Aku. (Hilariously, Aku is also depressed and tired, and uses a portion of himself to administer psychotherapy to himself.)
The stripping of the burdens, both physical and emotional, that he has accumulated over a half a century is essential to his development for the final sequences of his battle. The emotional is the more difficult, and he is about to commit Seppuku when events intervene.
There is one caveat that needs to be mentioned, and I have to be vague because it would be a massive spoiler. You know how when the coyote is chasing the road runner, and they both run off a cliff over a ravine, and the bird reaches the far cliff and stops. The coyote stops too, only he hasn’t reached solid ground. He’s standing in mid air, glaring at the bird. The bird flicks his tongue and points down. The coyote does, realizes he’s about to fall, gives the fourth wall a look of existential despair, holds up a little sign that says something like “Oh, no.” and then plummets. He doesn’t fall until he notices he can fall.
It’s what’s known as ‘cartoon physics.’
The ending of Samurai Jack has an important element of cartoon physics about it, and some will be annoyed. It’s not worth getting fashed over; it’s a beautiful story, gorgeous and lavish, and told almost perfectly.
It seals Samurai Jack as an all-time classic in animation, the animated best series I’ve seen. I watched the final season in 2017, and gave it a repeat viewing this week. It’s even better the second time around.
It was a great show, and you owe it to yourself to watch it if you haven’t already.
The entire series is available on Adult Swim https://www.adultswim.com/videos/samurai-jack/ , and all over Youtube.