Baseball, tagging/graffiti, Van Gogh, zombies, and Catholicism are tossed into the 'chanpurū' with a whole lot of revised Japanese pseudo-history. and what we have here is, in a nutshell, Edo-period Japan: the remix. Of course, the world's future is always in its past. In light of all the prescient futurism found in Watanabe's other works, it's rather interesting that he decided to shift his focus to the past and present. Of course, all of this was before the invention of the Vocaloid, though I suppose the future imagined by Watanabe and Gibson was, in a way, not so far off.Īnyhow, now that I've finished my little history lesson - which I feel is relevant, as having such a perspective may deepen your enjoyment of Samurai Champloo as much as it did for me - let's continue on to the review. Of course, Cowboy Bebop was not Shinichiro Watanabe's first foray into resonant crossover in anime: Macross Plus was a monolithic amalgamation of Top Gun's hot-headed romantic drama and sci-fi tropes including a pop-idol hologram version of 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL, in turn influencing the famous cyberpunk writer William Gibson to write Idoru, a novel about a Japanese virtual idol and her marriage to a real-life rock star. Cowboyīebop was a trend-setting marriage of anime traditions and Tarantino-inspired cultural hodgepodge - it could be said that Pulp Fiction influenced Cowboy Bebop as much as Cowboy Bebop influenced Kill Bill - and Samurai Champloo continues in this meta style, taking it even further.

'Champloo' itself comes from the word 'chanpurū,' Okinawan for 'something mixed,' and a source of Okinawa's pride in multicultural acceptance. Where Cowboy Bebop was a past + future fusion of jazz, rock, and blues, spaghetti western, kung fu, and noir cinema genres, and a setting equating outer space to the great frontier, Samurai Champloo is a more wildly anachronistic mélange of Edo-period history and contemporary hip-hop and bohemian culture. 'Samurai Champloo' may not have the same ring to it as 'Cowboy Bebop,' yet it is a title that has a similar function: to illustrate a combination of multicultural pulp fiction sensibility.

Mugen samurai champloo