Samurai Champloo
From Asaction
Matthews, Canaan, and Febronia from Xenosaga get pwned in a baseball game.
Jin is super-hot. And swordfights kick ass. Mugen's pwnsome breakdance sword fighting totally pwn teh series, but his math is way off.
Fuu is also quite cute and RODRIGUEZ TEH SUMO BEETLE!!!!!!
What else would you expect from Shinichiro Watanabe (the director of Cowboy Bebop)?
Glowing Review
With 1998's "Cowboy Bebop", one of the anime most wholeheartedly adopted by American fans, Shinichiro Watanabe became a creative force to watch out for. The innovative energy, drama and beauty of "Bebop" are carried forward in his second original series, "Samurai Champloo". Fans have been quick to look for similarities between "Bebop" and "Champloo" (even the titles have clear parallels), and it's true there are some: the assembly-of-rootless-loners cast of characters, the dramatic and cinematic visual style, and especially the importance and integration of music into the storytelling mix--in SC's case, everything from hip-hop beatboxing to Ainu and Okinawan folksong. But "Champloo"'s differences from "Bebop" are much more interesting than its likenesses. "Bebop" focuses on a tone of melancholy and regret, the lost past and the future not meant to be, while "Champloo" is about facing the future--the wave of change and the onrush of history that can't be stopped--and how three kids from widely diverse backgrounds find thrmselves on the crest of that wave. It's set in Edo Period Japan, where since 1638 the Tokugawa Shogunate had banned contact with all countries except China and Holland, a ban that lasted two centuries. The outside world can't be kept outside forever, the long-respected samurai class is losing its power, and there's restlessness in the land plus accompanying pressure from the Shogunate on all sides. Through this uneasy landscape (rendered in lushly beautiful watercolors that might remind you of Miyazaki) travel the Champloo cast: outlaw ronin Jin, a gifted swordsman, stoic, disciplined and heartbreakingly beautiful, devoted to the bushido code but exiled for a violent crime; Okinawan wild-boy Mugen, orphan, former pirate and brilliant innovator, whose fighting style mixes everything from Brazilian capoeira to break-dancing, and whose feral-child innocence faces the toughest tests in the series; and teahouse waitress Fuu, spunky, compassionate and packing a lot of secrets, who rescues the two swordsmen from the executioner's block and enlists them on her quest. On their long walk from Edo to Nagasaki they'll see a lot, face a lot of trials, starve, quarrel, save each other's lives, break up, re-bond, and become inseparable. Except that Jin and Mugen still swear they'll fight to the death one day, and no one (not even Fuu) is saying anything about the Sunflower Samurai, the object of Fuu's quest.
But this is no straight historical drama--it can be hysterically funny as well as vividly bloody, contains fight scenes and anachronisms by the carload (the aforementioned break dancing and beatboxing, Jin's Armani glasses, the appearance of landmarks not built till the 1900s...)and has sharp things to say about the heavy hand of authority and tradition on groups as diverse as gay men, married women, foreigners, aboriginal natives and illegal aliens.
