Spoiler Comics Book Reviews: FROM THE VAULT: Samurai 7

Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is an extremely influential piece, will the Anime live up to the original?

Major Spoilers Adventures #93: Over the Counter

Matthew reviews a landmark issue from a unique perspective.

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Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is an extremely influential piece. It has spawned hundreds of other works. Some, like the Magnificent Seven are practically the same movie, transposed to a different time and place. Others like Oceans Eleven and the Three Amigos are send-ups or riffs on its structure. So when I first heard that an anime series had been made based on Seven Samurai my head filled with questions. How faithful would this be? How can you take an two-hour-long film and stretch it over twenty-something episodes? These were all intriguing questions. Of course as you can see from the date of this article, not so intriguing to cause me to drop everything and go watch it, but alas Netflix instant watch makes connoisseurs of us all.

Samurai 7
Directors:
Futoshi Higashide
Yasuhiro Kuroda and Others.
Voices:
R. Bruce Elliott
Christopher Sabat
Sean Teague

Oh yeah, at this point I’d also like to point out that the only version available to me was the dubbed version. So if there were any major changes from the Japanese language version I’m not aware of them.

Ostrichturtle And The Robot

Samurai 7 takes place in a country that is in the process of recovering from a major war. There are hundreds of unemployed samurai, some of them become yojimbos to wealthy merchants, others become bandits. This is all pretty close to the original movie, except, of course for the alien fauna, cyborg brigands and giant robots. Which sounds exciting, except for the fact that, at this point, at least to me, this is a pretty standard setting. Sure, one of the seven samurai is a robot, sure, the antagonist samurai became giant sentient mecha during the war, sure, there’s actual magic in the world, but in the end it all comes across as a fairly vanilla steam-punk sundae.

That One Has Goggles

I was excited when I first saw the cover for the show, since, standing in the group shot was what I assumed to be two girls. “That’s cool,” I thought, “I wonder how the story will change when two of the samurai are actually women, this will probably bring a new oh, those are dudes, aren’t they? I forgot this came from Japan for a second.”
Pretty, pretty boys aside, I like the design of the characters, largely because their bodies and faces are different from each other, as opposed to being identical paper dolls with different hair styles and clothes. The characters’ personalities clearly show through their design. Which is good, because it’s their personalities that drive the whole piece. Eager samurai is eager, old samurai is tired, robot samurai is loud and sullen samurai is sullen.

Follows The Plot… Slowly

The plot of the series is largely that of the movie; peasants beset by bandits send someone to the city to find Samurai to protect them. They find an old samurai who then helps them recruit the rest, finally leading to a major confrontation with the bandits. Except that rather than skipping the days in-between finding samurai, the series has the protagonists get themselves in and out of trouble in the big city. Sometimes the process is somewhat painful as characters that we know are destined to join the group come in, leave, change their mind, and come back over the span of a dozen episodes. Over the first five episodes a lot of characters are introduced, fortunately every character is so visually distinctive that it’s not too hard to remember who’s who.

As I said before, the series follows (at its own leisurely pace) the plot of the movie, so you can imagine my surprise when, after fifteen episodes (or so) the good guys defeat the bad guys, the farmers go back to their lives, Old samurai muses on the nature of war, the young romantic protagonists exchange meaningful glances, the screen fades to black and Netflix asks, “Do you want to watch the next episode?”

WHAT!?

Yes, it keeps going, into a third act that is most definitely not in the movie. Old enemies return, weird plot threads are tied up, heart-wrenching secrets are revealed and the viewer might ask himself, “Why did I sit through a dozen episodes to finally get to the story the writers clearly wanted to tell?” At least I did.

All around, Samurai 7 was not a bad experience. I am not the sort of person who will sit through an entire series that doesn’t deliver (I’m looking at you Witchblade Anime), so the fact that I watched it all the way through at least means it is entertaining on a basic level. If you like ensemble pieces this may be something you like, if you’re looking to get into Anime, this might be a good place to start, since it’s pretty accessible.

Samurai 7 gets three stars from me, although I’m sure the subbed version would be at least 1/16th of a star higher.

Rating:

About the Author

Nobody really knows what Rodrigo's deal is. He is a perpetual enigma, an unknown quantity, the X factor. He's the new kid in school, the unlisted number, the person all your friends talk about, but you've never met. How can one person be so mysterious, you ask? THAT IS ALSO TOTALLY A MYSTERY! You can try to keep tabs on him on twitter by following @fearsomecritter, but that probably won't help.This entry was posted in Animation, Anime, Featured, From the Vault, Review and tagged akira kurosawa, Anime, From the Vault, katana, Review, Samurai, samurai 7, Samurai seven, Seven Samurai. Bookmark the permalink.← TALK BACK: Thor: The Mighty AvengerVARIANT COVER: Spider-Man saves your comic shop →5 Responses to

Russ Catt says:May 6, 2011 at 12:58 pm

I think I agree with all your major points.

I watched this series originally as it released through not-legal means and I was completely floored by the high production value and the very cool character designs.
I only managed to watch up to episode 10 at the time. If I could give at rating then-and-there, it definitely would have been 4-4.5 stars.
Years later, i watched the entire series through on Blu-Ray and I found the final arc to be very jarring in comparison to the rest of the series. Which is a great shame, because the majority of the episodes are pure gold, in my opinion.

Great review sir!

Alvarlux says:May 6, 2011 at 1:18 pm

This is funny – I watched the first 5 or so eps of this subbed when it was first airing and recently wondered if i should give this a watch.

Thanks for the timely review

Hiro says:May 6, 2011 at 4:01 pm

i believe in the original japanese, the robots are more cyborgs than sentient robots. once human, the samurai would exchange their human bodies for mecha to better serve their lords in war. Kikuchiyo (the robot samurai of the seven) was once a farmer class/peasant and in order to become a samurai has taken on a robot body created by the engineer guy.

Steven Allen says:May 7, 2011 at 10:22 am

What other anime series have you watched? and will you be reviewing any more?. I’ve seen quite alot of anime over the years starting from the 70′s with the classics “astroboy,gigantor,speed racer,starblazers/Space cruiser Yamato, and have watched the subcukture evolve to what it has become today,.If you dont mind i have another series you might like to review : The Hakkenden /Legend of the Dog Warriors. Check it out. Peace!

Rodrigo says:May 7, 2011 at 4:02 pm

I’ll check it out. I’d like to review more anime. I’m currently watching Mushi-Shi and hopefully will review it soon after I’m done. Which won’t be soon, cuz I still have a bunch of episodes left.

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