Samurai Champloo

If you haven't seen Samurai Champloo yet, what the hell are you waiting for?
Samurai Champloo is a very stylish and episodic series that follows the adventures of three companions as they travel across Japan.
The presentation is great; it has a terrific animation and a fantastic style. The series blends modern hip-hop culture with Edo period Japan. Combining graffiti tagging and beat boxing with samurai is certainly an unusual combination, but it works surprisingly well and creates an atmosphere unlike that of any other anime.
Here is the story:

Sometime during the 17th-19th century, during the Japanese "Edo era", two Samurai Warriors known as Mugen and Jin, have a chance meeting with a 15 year old girl named Fuu. Through a series of events, Fuu leads the warriors on a quest into several different Japanese locations to find the samurai who smells of sunflowers. And then there’s little Fuu, the mystery girl.
We know just as little about her. Mother dead, father long missing, she’s drifted and worked a variety of jobs, despite her young age, only 15. The earth element of the triad, she wears mauve-shaded pink, right down to her plum-blossom-patterned tanto knife.
A teashop waitress when we meet her, she takes the arson destruction of the teahouse as a sign that it’s time for her to hit the road and go on her great quest: the search for a mysterious samurai who smells like sunflowers.
Who is he?
What is he to Fuu?
Why does she want to find him?
Do sunflowers even have any smell?
These become the background questions of the series. Though anime-girl cute with her big brown eyes and petite figure, Fuu is no pushover and will not be bullied.
She’s brave and determined, willing - like the guys - to go hungry, improvise, and live by her wits to reach her goal. She hates to see anyone or anything bullied or mistreated and will stand up to anyone in defense of the abused; her compassionate heart has already earned her the love of several unlikely characters in the series. Nor is she afraid to call names and knock heads when her newly adopted older brothers misbehave.
She’s got a bit of a gambling bug and has awe-inspiring skills as a dice dealer, acquired we have no idea how or when. Hidden somewhere on her person at the unlikeliest times is her pet flying squirrel, Momosan, which has helped her out of several jams. And, of course, she’s the driver of the trio’s adventure: she helped rescue Mugen and Jin for the express purpose of recruiting them, and though they run into many things on the road, their end goal is always hers.
Quiet, dignified, disciplined and enigmatic, Jin is in every respect the polar opposite of Mugen, a classically trained swordsman with a precise and lethal fighting style. As Mugen wears red, he wears indigo blue. His age is given as 20.
Everything about him says “aristocrat”: His glasses, his pale complexion and stately height, his manners and his devotion to the code of the samurai. The very fact that he's permitted to carry a daisho says he's from a samurai family.
His name means “benevolence and compassion”. He carries himself with unshakable self- confidence, and is virtually unbeatable, a devastating duelist with superbly pure technique and a blinding-fast draw.
Jin keeps firm control of himself in every possible aspect from his appearance and appetite to his level monotone voice, speaks little, and has but once been heard to laugh: when kneeling at the headsman's block.
He seems to be seeking inner peace and balance in warrior’s discipline, and possesses a core of deep calm, but he's a creature of fierce pride and intensity that typically kills with a single stroke.
At his darkest he radiates bitter, repressed anger, and observes the world with a narrow, resentful stare; at his best, he's all a samurai should be, capable of great gentleness, courtesy, martial skill and dauntless courage. He's almost two people, the detached and passive Jin who does as bidden, permits his friends to drag him around and unfailingly respects his elders, and the lightning-fast nemesis he becomes when he draws his sword. He only seems truly awake and alive when fighting.
There's a great crime in his past: he trained in a dojo whose claim to fame was that its master-Mariya Enshirou, had fought a thousand sword duels without a defeat. He was praised as a prodigy and a genius, but something went very wrong: Jin killed his master, was obliged to leave the school and took to the road.
Even now others trained by this master have sworn revenge and are seeking his life. What’s one to do when the system one was raised to respect turns and punishes you for doing, as told, your very best?
Yet his faith in the warrior’s way remains the only thing he owns-and even that he has begun to question, a deep, surfacing feeling that no one was born to serve and obey all his life-along with his honor and his katana, and it would be worth your life to try taking any of them from him.
A tough street fighter, Mugen is as straightforward as they come, a smartass bundle of attitude and appetite. Orphaned at a young age, he raised himself in rough-and-tumble Ryukyu prison camp where toughs, pirates and sailors from everywhere were only too eager to show off a wide range of brawling tactics.
Mugen early on began developing the free-for-all fighting style he calls “champuru kendo”, swiping bits and pieces from everything thrown at him and making up the rest as he went along. He’s done jail time for an unknown offense as well. His lazy, sloppy exterior covers a feral temper that can flare into violence in an instant, but he’s equally capable of forming quick loyalties and defending girls in peril when it suits him.
He’s shrewd, suspicious, perceptive, but basically relaxed and happy-go-lucky; utterly practical and pragmatic, trusts nothing but his own abilities and instincts, and has zero compunctions about kicking your lights out for lunch money, or any other reason that amuses him.
His distrust and dislike of authority figures is deeply ingrained, and he'll basically do anything he's told not to, just because. By the time we meet him, he’s about 19 and barely civilized, well set in a course of devoting his life to nothing but his favorite pursuits: eating, sleeping, chasing women and sword fighting, in no particular order.
A rough case with great charm, satisfied with his life and his freedom, willing to handle whatever fate throws his way as long as he need follow no rules and serve no master-and yet, every day he says, ready to die.
Except when he's not. In the remarkable first half of episode #14, we see him have a near death experience he's apparently had before; he sinks down into the sea and comes out on the other side, as if through a mirror, falls up through the water surface into a strange, luminous, inverted world.
Mysterious, tall figures, warrior spirits or gods bearing spears and wrapped in shaggy cloaks surround him their, and what does he say to them?
"What, you again?" and then "Hey, wait, I don't want to go yet..." at which they vanish and he falls back into the water to begin his return to the surface and his unfinished life.
This is a charmed life, unassuming as it seems on the surface, one that' s been nearly lost at least twice and saved both times. Definitely someone ready for a greater destiny to step up and take his hand...
And as the series has progressed, we've watched him develop a remarkable depth of feeling, a conscience almost, a growing sense have the wrongness and injustice in the world around him.
He's no social crusader, but he knows in his bones that people deserve freedom and self-determination, that one's life is one's own to shape, and the anger at official oppression that used to be just a punk dislike of cops and soldiers has steadily developed into something much deeper and stronger.
His clear-cut sense of right and wrong plays into this, as well. By the time of episode 17 we see him taking out a bank of Matsumae-Han militia just because he's angry at the way they've treated an Ainu villager, which is so far from the casual brawler we met back in Edo.
Since the two main character samurai have different fighting styles, it's always interesting to watch them fight.
Mugen is a break-dance fighter and likes to use his feet, along with everything in his environment.
Jin on the other hand, is a more traditional fighter, and uses very quick slashes.

The fight scenes are fast paced and intense.
Special effects are also well done in fights, such as how swords cut a neat path through water.
There are 26 episodes total-a true work of art that succeeds in evoking strong emotions.

If you have a bit of free time and want to see a great action-packed anime, watch Samurai Champloo. You definitely won't be disappointed.

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