A very crisp, beautiful design that is easily comparable to Shinichiro Watanabe’s other works, such as Cowboy Bebop. It perhaps even surpasses it, with well-drawn characters that seem to move more fluidly than water itself.

Interestingly, Samurai Champloo has a very similar underlying theme to that of Cowboy Bebop, being that there is no running from the past. As such, our protagonists, Mugen, Jin, and Fuu, must deal with the problems of not only their pasts, but those of their family and friends. These are usually resolved through a mix of comedy, action, and drama, each creating a sense of closeness between the viewer and the characters. Set in the ficticious Edo period of Japanese history, you cannot help but notice the anachronistic elements of the show, such as violent baseball games and intense hip-hop battles. But they just add to the great story.

The main cast of Kari Wahlgren (Fuu), Steven Blum (Mugen), and Kirk Thornton (Jin) all turn in great performances, perfectly capturing their characters attitudes and personalities. However, some of the additional voice cast is sub-par, but none detract too much from the show.

A great mix of soft, string scores and energetic hip-hop tunes. While the hip-hop can seem a bit tacked-on sometimes, it adds a very audacious element to an already great show.

Champloo is a great anime that should go down as one of the best of Watanabe’s works, almost on par with his masterpiece, Cowboy Bebop.

The animation is so unique and just plain cool! The characters all have their own personal look and the animation draws into the series!

The story is awesome!!!!! It’s serious and hilarious all at the right moments! Samurai Champloo’s ending was my FAVORITE ending of any anime i have EVER seen. I was sad that the series ended, but they couldn’t have ended it better!

The voice acting is amazing! The cast is full of some of my favorite voice actors and they all fit the personalites of the characters perfectly.

My favorite anime soundtrack ever. EVER. The hip-hop feel and all of the artists are so awesome... it’s hard to describe. I could listen to the soundtrack every day for the rest of my life and never get bored. It’s that great! I think that Samurai Champloo has the greatest anime soundtrack ever!

Samurai Champloo is one of the coolest anime series out there. The characters all have deep personalities and the storyline is fantastic! You will laugh, cry, and you will experience emotions that you’ve never felt before!!! The music is the best ( if you’re into the hip-hop, jazzy feel); The animation is amazing and I hope you’ll like it as much as i do! I give it an A++!!!!

Samurai Champloo starts off with three main characters, Mugen, Jin and Fuu. Mugen is a street fighter with vast skills as a samurai. He’s hot-headed, arrogant, and is always looking for a fight. Jin is his opposite, he first appears as a calm, humble samurai who fights for good, whose skills with a sword are also great. Fuu is the character that keeps them all together, she’s a 15 year old waitress for a teahouse who meets Mugen first when he enters the teahouse and demands 50 dumplings and he will take care of the men on the other side of the house that were causing trouble. She first refuses but then doubles the dumplings in desperation when she ! gets into a fight with them. Mugen beats the living crap out of them and demands that the strongest “Bad-asses”; that were guarding the thug’s father (who happened to be the governor) and mistakes Jin as one of them. They begin to fight (evenly matched in skills) and the teahouse ends up catching on fire and burns to the ground.

This is how the series starts out, and Fuu goes on a search to find the “Samurai that smells of sunflowers ”; who ends up being her father and makes Mugen and Jin come along due to the fact that after being captured, Fuu saves their lives. Later on in the series we learn more things about the characters, such as that Jin killed his master who taught him how to wield a sword when he was 18. The story of Samurai Champloo is ver y humorous at times and is well written.

The animation of Samurai Champloo is extremely detailed and well done. This series shows that the animators put much effort into creating the characters. Also the background animation is stunning, if you ever watch this series don’t forget to take a look at the scenery.

Usually the voice acting from Americans is atrocious, but this time it was very well done. The performance from Mugen and Jin were especially phenomenal. There were no odd pauses or extremely fast phrases that I could see throughout the series.

Samurai Champloo’s sound track was definitely unique. Unlike other anime shows that usually use three or four music tracks over and over again, Samurai Champloo uses a type of hip-hop and random record scratches (usually when changing a scene) during it’s episodes which is very unusual for an anime show. I thought it was very original and fascinating how it’s music gave a different feel of things.

The animation is great, it’s detailed and unique, but what really sets it apart is well choreographed and intense fight sequences. All in all it has great artwork and awesome detail.

Samurai Champloo has a very distinctive story it’s a bit shadowy so it keeps you guessing. The only downfall is that some of the episodes veer from the main storyline, regardless each episode keeps you fascinated in their own individual way.

Acting-9- The acting is outstanding; each character is portrayed with an extremely unique personality. Overall the acting is great.

Soundtrack-8- It was refreshing to see a samurai anime with a hip-hop twist. It’s a fairly different take on the samurai genre and it goes well with the show as well as complementing the fight scenes.

Overall-9- Three unsuspecting strangers cross paths and begin to travel together in search of a samurai that smells of sunflowers. Full of intense action, enormous detail and sweet music; Samurai Champloo is definitely worth watching.

This shows animation is just amazing. I can’t get over the opening sequence, beautiful. I was especially amazed by fight sequences. The animation mixes classic sword fighting techniques with a modern sort of “breakdancing”; style. Very unique to a samurai type show.

The story in Champloo is great. Fuu convinces both Mugen and Jin to travel with her as she searches for the samurai who smells of sunflowers. What I especially liked about the story was that each episode had some sort of relationship with real life situations.

This sets Champloo apart from many other shows.

I was so excited to find out that Kirk Thornton voiced Jin in Samurai Champloo. Being a fan of “Digimon: Digital Monsters”; when I was younger and finding out that Gabumon is now a timid samurai was great. Just as exciting as Gabumon, Haruko from FLCL (Kari Wahlgren {Fuu}) is one of my all time favorite voice actors. Overall, the voice acting is wonderful.

I love this show. The samurai / breakdancing mix just seems to hit a soft spot in my heart. Even if you’re not a fan of anime, Samurai Champloo may be the series to change you.

The Animation in Samurai Champloo is awesome. The character’s movements are fluid and they were able to capture some of what made Cowboy Bebop such a cool show to watch. The Art was pretty trippy as well, throwing the feudal Japan era into a sort of Hip Hop style was cool.

The story was pretty good, but it was missing a strong plot line. Very few episodes really revolved around each character’s story and the climax could have been a lot more interesting. A girl searching for the Sunflower Samurai while dragging along 2 Samurai who hate each other but have equal abilities, and just happen to be 2 of the most undefeatable guys around. It sounds almost cliche. However, I will say that some of the fillers are great, they have some great humor.

I haven’t heard the English dub very much at all, but from what I know from the Japanese episodes, the voices fit the characters very well. The whole atmosphere created with the Hip Hop music and such made it worthwhile to watch, and I don’t even like rap or Hip Hop. In the end, it all just fit very well into place and that’s why I gave it a 10.

The animation on Samurai Champloo is totally wicked.

The story line for Samurai Champloo is original and creative and a decent one. After you watch the first episode you would want to see more to see what happens next. I also personally like how the director threw in a few historical episodes.

The voice acting on this series was brilliant the cast for all of the characters really did bring out the characters personality even the HIP-HOP characters MAD props to that with their slang.

A mixture of hip-hop music influences and character designs. The fight scene are madly insane crazy.

Overall this is another series you must watch if you’re a fan of Cowboy bebop definitely check this one out you won’t be disappointed.

The animation in Samurai Champloo is a sight to behold, for sure. The unique art style flows flawlessly, making action sequences look nothing short of beautiful. Settings are vast and pretty, and the show is, overall, a big piece of eye candy. One gripe is that most of the character designs are rather basic, and uninspired. It’s just barely enough to tell characters apart, but only the main three protagonists’ appearances will stick in your mind. Whether that’s because of any successes in their design, or because we see them so much, I can’t say.

Samurai Champloo is largely episodic. There is a main story, regarding the search for a “Samurai who smells of sunflowers”;, but this plot point is rarely touched upon. I’ve heard fans try and tell me that the focus is on the journey, not the destination, but all that amounts to is a total disregard for plot development. After 15 episodes of absolutely no leads, or hints, as to who, or what, the Sunflower Samurai is, one can get frustrated that the story just isn’t going anywhere. And for how long the series strings the viewer along on this one plot premise, the climactic episodes are anything but, featuring a less-than-shocking revelation of the Sunflower Samurai’s identity, and final battles against opponents that just come out of nowhere. Awesome as the fights may be to watch, the “final boss”; of a series is never a character you want introduced in the same manner as every other “villain of the day”; in every other episode.

That being said, each individual episode is fun to watch, featuring a wide variety of fun situations. Shinichiro Watanabe’s influence shows big time, here. The stories are told with flawless pacing and execution, character interaction feels real, and there’s even that “horror episode where everyone dies at the end”; theme that we saw back in his last work; the impeccable Cowboy Bebop. Unfortunately, this series is quite overshadowed by its big brother Bebop. While the characters in Bebop had an incredible amount of depth, the protagonists in Champloo are largely archetypical; Mugen is the no-nonsense punk, Jin is the quiet, serious one, and Fuu is the semi-bubbly, emotional woman. It would take paragraphs to describe the protagonists in Bebop, but I just summed up this cast in a sentence.

Another un-ignorable flaw is that, although the series is supposed to stylistically mesh hip-hop and samurai, the presence of hip-hop is few and far between. Aside from Mugen, very few characters play the anachronistic game, and I can only think of two episodes where the hip-hop feel was strongly present (those would be the episode with the beat-boxing guy, and the tagging episode). As much as the series presents itself as a hip-hop samurai tale, it’s severely lacking in the hip-hop department. This, of course, leaves Champloo as a basic samurai anime, which isn’t exactly a unique genre. That being said, it’s still a GOOD basic samurai anime. Not spectacular, by any means, and I probably wouldn’t watch it all the way through, again, but still a good watch the first time around.

I really haven’t reviewed a show with a bad performance yet, and I can’t complain about that one bit. Chaploo features a variety of VA heavy-hitters (including vocal juggernaut Steve Blum as Mugen, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone aware of how much he enjoys Watanabe’s work) doing that voodoo that they do so well. No one falters in this series, opting instead to treat us to a voice acting tour-de-force worthy of a Watanabe anime.

While Cowboy Bebop was littered with songs reflecting the musical genre of the series, Champloo only has a small handful of actual rap songs, and only one I thought was any good (which would be Hiji Zuru STYLE, from the tagging episode), and one or two R&B songs. The rest of the music is basically beats, most of them quite repetitive and hard to listen to in their entirety, outside of the show. Compared to its big brother, Champloo’s score feels half-hearted, and the hip-hop element seems mostly ignored through much of the series.

Samurai Champloo feels like what would happen if, say, Spielberg directed a sitcom; brilliant direction on a very basic storyline. Still, no one ever said a story had to be mind-blowing and brilliant to be entertaining, and fun to watch. Samurai Champloo will definitely entertain you the first time you see it, but I can’t recommend it as a show you can watch over and over again. Watch it on TV or rent it. That’s my recommendation.

A great mesh between modern day art, street grafitti, and anime. The characters’ movement in battle and just in walking through the woods is an art in itself with the design the creators make as the wind blows and the little effects that they put in the background.

The many stories that make up the series, as well as the main backstory of finding the sunflower samurai keep the watchers interested at all times. The watcher wants to find out who the sunflower samurai is, and the story behind Jin and Mugen as well.

The dubbing was pretty good on this show. Some of the voices, however, took some getting used to. None of the main characters, but some of the minor characters that pop in during some episodes.

The mix between action, comedy, mystery and a slight romance keeps the watchers of this show on the edge of their seat. The voicing is well done, and the artwork in an aesthetic design.

Champloo is nothing short of visually stunning. Character design ranges from the unique threads of Mugen to the typical samurai stylings of Jin and all kinds of variations in between. While some characters may not look like they belong in Edo Japan, they certainly look like they belong in this series. That said, the animation is fantastic. Fight sequences aren’t terribly common, but the individual sword styles of Jin and Mugen are displayed with gusto.

The story of Samurai Champloo starts off a bit sluggish and clumsily, but is quick to correct its balance. While Jin and Mugen may have taken on the task of assisting Fuu for ridiculous, if not entirely unexplained, reasons, they never dwell on this and are quick to offer more interesting destractions than the genesis of the journey. Plus, as the story winds on, the relationship between the trio strengthens to the point that you don’t care about the lack of an explanation for the story as a whole.

Whether in Japanese or English, the dubbing in Champloo is fantastic. The voices match the characters expertly and there aren’t any strange statements being made that make you wonder what the voice director was thinking. The episodic nature of the show allows for a new order of guest characters to be served up in each edition. Each of these is acted and casted with the same expertise as the main trio.

Champloo’s tunes are a bit hit and miss. They start off the series with an odd amalgamation of modern times contrasted with Edo Japan, but are quick to drop that. However, they keep the hip-hop and record scratching musical direction throughout the show. That’s not to say the music is bad, though. In the end, I guess I was just a bit disappointed that they didn’t go all out with the music. After all, this is a Shinichiro Watanabe series, and if Cowboy Bebop’s going to have a stellar entirely original jazz soundtrack for 26 episodes, why stop so short of that with hip hop in Champloo? In the end, the music is good and oddly fitting, but leaves a bit to be desired.