Samurai Jack episode 1+2 review

First two episodes of Jack have been screened for limited audiences, here's what they thought

theverge.com/2017/2/27/14747336/samurai-jack-season-five-review-recap-genndy-tartakovsky

STOP TEASING AND JUST PUSH IT INSIDE ALREADY

Fuck you, OP. Post the important stuff, don't just shill the link.

Probably no cartoon series today needs and deserves a conclusion more than Samurai Jack. The series, from legendary animator and director Genndy Tartakovsky, ended its run on Cartoon Network back in 2004 with a painfully incomplete story and a legion of diehard fans. The protagonist — a virtuous medieval samurai thrown through time into the far future — was last seen protecting a baby and searching for its lost mother. Yet as the final credits rolled, Jack remained stuck in the future, trapped by the demon Aku, who had conquered the world and remade it as a techno-dystopian hellscape. Jack’s ongoing quest to return home — “back to the past,” as the opening credits song says — remained unfulfilled.

More than a decade after that 52nd episode aired, Jack’s tale is getting its conclusion in the form of a final 10-episode season, directed by Tartakovsky and featuring many of the original key creative team. The first episode of the final arc airs on the Adult Swim block of Cartoon Network on March 11th. And it lets Tartakovsky explore more mature themes, thanks to its bump from a TV-Y7 to a TV-14 rating. What’s clear from the first two chapters of the final saga is that this season will take full advantage of that freedom to flesh out Jack, his ideals, and the pain he’s suffered from fighting Aku for more than 50 years.

Samurai Jack isn’t an average American cartoon. The Emmy Award-winning show did enjoy the Cartoon Network spotlight for three years, starting in 2001. But while it’s nominally a children’s show about a battling hero and a scary monster, it carries a subtle, somber undertone that made it unlike anything on TV at the time. It’s a tale about a lost man, a warrior whose insurmountable power and drive to protect the innocent ultimately trapped him in an alien world, and left him waging war against a foe that might as well be the devil himself.

Like so many great cartoons of its era, Samurai Jack speaks to kids and adults alike, in different yet equally powerful ways. Tartakovsky, responsible for Dexter’s Laboratory and the excellent Star Wars: Clone Wars microseries, has a knack for giving material from a known universe — Japanese folklore, for instance, or the story of Darth Vader — a style, polish, and identity all its own. With Samurai Jack, Tartakovsky mixes in one part anime, one part myth, and one part cyberpunk. The resulting combination is a widely stylized success tinged with equal measures of action, humor, and sadness.

When we meet Jack again in the new series, more than 12 years after the September 2004 episode that cut his narrative short, he is not the man we once knew. Heavily bearded and heavily armored, Jack has come to rely on the machinery and weapons he once fought against. He rides a motorcycle, carries a pistol, and wields a metal staff pulsing with electricity.

But the most telling transformations reside inside his psyche. Over 50 years of fighting Aku, he has not aged a day. This is, he says, an unforeseen byproduct of his journey through time. He is haunted by his inability to protect his family in the past, and reverse the course of history that brought Aku to ascendency. Aku has also squashed every portal back in time, turning Jack into a ronin, tortured by his failure and with no mission in mind.

Of course, much of what critics have come to enjoy about Tartakovsky’s work over the years is not its minimalist storytelling, but in the way those stories are told through visuals. As critic Matt Zoller Seitz pointed out in Vulture in 2014, shows like Samurai Jack and Clone Wars illustrated Tartakovsky’s masterful ability to use composition, cinematography, and editing to create exquisite and unforgettable animated sequences. “The plot was never the point,” he wrote. “It was always about the visual music that Tartakovsky, his designers, and his animators created onscreen.”

In season five of Samurai Jack, Tartakovsky’s technique is on full display, helped in part by more than a decade of advances in animation. Every shot of the first two episodes is bursting to the brim with a distinct visual language and carefully crafted color choices. Even simple fight scenes, like Jack’s arrival in episode one, bombard viewers with information: the camera swiveling with Jack’s violent polearm thrusts, or time slowing down and the shot shrinking to a tiny square to show the spiked wheels of his motorcycle crushing a robot’s face. A Tartakovsky hallmark — the lingering extreme close-up on a character’s pointed expression — says more than a dozen lines of dialogue.

Season five is visually striking, but the story packs bigger surprises. As always, Jack is called upon to protect innocents and dispatch Aku’s threatening, predatory robots, but now he does so with an undeniable streak of savage anger. As he stalks the land, he remains haunted by the screams and pleas of his long-dead parents. They show up as astral presences, or as hallucinated faces in running water and fallen leaves. Even though Jack says there is nothing he can do to return to the past, he cannot shake the torment these ghosts bring him.

Even with the weight of Jack’s grief hanging over every moment, Tartakovsky manages to flavor certain scenes with an absurdist comedic flair. In the first episode, Jack faces down a robotic villain who scat-sings and wields a magical jazz flute as a weapon. In the opening of episode two, the demon Aku struggles out of bed like a cranky teenager. Scenes like this help lift the show out of Jack’s despair, and keep alive the playful, cartoony spirit of the original series’ run.

The darkest and most violent actors of season five’s first two episodes are a cadre of seven female assassins, bred as killers and disciples of Aku. These black-clad warriors move in a pack to hunt, trap, and kill Jack once and for all. When they find him, the show launches into a dialogue-devoid chase scene that cleverly uses sounds, shadows, and haunting arrangements of symmetry to create one of the best sequences in the series’ history. It ends on a startling, revelatory moment — the first time the new Adult Swim-sanctioned Samurai Jack trades in blue robot oil for the bright, tomato-red blood of a human being.

That’s also the moment when we can most clearly see where Tartakovsky plans to take this final season of Samurai Jack. The show has always been about the divisions between right and wrong, and the kinds of personal sacrifices we make to stay true to our own moral codes. Throughout the series, Jack has had endless opportunities to forgo his just upbringing and warrior’s virtue in exchange for what he desires most — Aku’s death, and a way back to the past.

Yet time and again, Jack has chosen to cherish human life and put others before himself. Now, as he faces the possibility of having to kill real people to make his own survival possible, we’re seeing just how dark, deep, and painfully true Tartakovsky is willing to go in Jack’s redemptive conclusion.

Season five of Samurai Jack debuts on Saturday, March 11th at 11PM ET on Adult Swim.

Yeah, let's ignore these 'til we get to see the show itself.

>Jack faces down a robotic villain who scat-sings and wields a magical jazz flute as a weapon.

JEJ.

Somebody doesn't like foreplay....

>Jack is called upon to protect innocents and dispatch Aku’s threatening, predatory robots, but now he does so with an undeniable streak of savage anger.

What happened to the whole shpeal of jack training with monks to defeat his anger?

>HIS SWORD IS FUCKING GONE

This is undeniably the worst slap to the face ive seen so far. Ive seen promotional art of him holding his sword so hopefully at some point he retrieves it

We already know it's going to be shit from the preview.

Conside suicide my man

So wait, we're getting just one season of this?

>What happened to the whole shpeal of jack training with monks to defeat his anger?
50 years of getting punched in the soul dick is gonna wear out any meditation training man.

We already know your life is shit, no need to try and rain on other people's parade with vacuous memes.

>This is undeniably the worst slap to the face ive seen so far. Ive seen promotional art of him holding his sword so hopefully at some point he retrieves it

You have to be some kind of retard to think he doesn't. No having the sword is a major obstacle to accomplish his goal, so it will be his first hurdle to pass in his way defeat Aku. It's better than previous seasons where he didn't defeat Aku even If he had him cornered just because.

>What happened to the whole shpeal of jack training with monks to defeat his anger?
He's been doing this shit for 50 years without aging, AND all the portals to the past are gone. If that's not enough to unravel somebody, I don't know what is. Most of people he met in Seasons 1 through 4 are almost certainly very old or dead.

>This is undeniably the worst slap to the face ive seen so far. Ive seen promotional art of him holding his sword so hopefully at some point he retrieves it
The whole point of the story is that during those 50 years Jack has found himself unworthy of the sword. It's a redemption arc, of course he'll get it back. Storytelling.

Genndy has referred to this as more of a 5-hour TV movie than a season. It's all one consistent arc that will end the story.

>slap to the face
>was one of the first details Genndy told us about in his first interview on the show

Yes, the whole idea behind this was to conclude the series. Episode 10 of this will be the official finale of the series.

It's better this way, it guarantees closure, rather than possibly not getting it if the series doesn't do that well ratings wise. Plus I'd rather they not drag it out anyway, especially with how long AS takes to make content. Who knows how long this was sitting on the table before it got announced in 2015

>was one of the first details Genndy told us about in his first interview on the show
>expecting casuals to actually pay attention to this kind of stuff

so how long are the episodes?
are these normal episodes or shorts?

22 minutes, 11pm starting next Saturday

Normal episodes.

That's true, the influx of fairweather Toonami """fans""" that have been showing up in the Toonami threads the past month or so and asking dumbass questions has skyrocketed

nice

It's not our fault Toonami fucking sucks and airs purely dogshit. Jack is literally the one thing they have done since revival that was worth a damn

>Funding and getting World Premieres of Space Dandy
>Doing Intruder 2 & 3, including getting Sonny Strait to reprise his role as TOM 1
>Some really nice TOM inspirational promos/musical promos using clips from shows/game reviews
>Picking up a show CN cancelled before its run ended and airing all of its episodes before they literally couldn't anymore (even if it wasn't that great of a show, it wasn't bad, and it was a cool thing to do)
Nah, they've done more than Jack.

Aren't a mini-series by the GitS guy and S2&3 of FLCL coming too?

>world premier space dandy
Or you could wait 12 hours and watch it in the proper language
>Intruder shit
Who cares? All it was was a glorified way to upgrade the block packaging. I'm sure they really put a lot of effort in to getting Sonny Strait on the phone for his paragraph worth of distorted dialog
>game reviews/inspirational stuff
Again nobody cares, all Toonami game reviews are rigged, TOM will shittalk a game the entire review and give it 8/10
>picking up a CN show that was canned because no one cared about it
Wow what a great gesture, I sure love watching CN garbage at 3am on ADULT swim
>mini series
Mini amount of care by anyone
>FLCL
Was announced a year before Toonami announced their involvement, would have happens anyway even if AS didn't pay the bills

>In the opening of episode two, the demon Aku struggles out of bed like a cranky teenager
perfect

>Was announced a year before Toonami announced their involvement
Not exactly. In August 2015, Production IG said they were "considering" making new FLCL. The official announcement was in March 2016, from Adult Swim.

>Or you could wait 12 hours and watch it in the proper language
Dandy had a perfect dub, my man. The Japanese was not bad at all, but Ian Sinclair NAILED his role, and the rest of the main cast as well as most major side characters had great voices. I feel like Dandy is what put Ian Sinclair on the map, as he's been getting really good long-term roles since then.

Also you seem to be projecting your own lack of caring about the rest of that shit onto literally all other people. I know the reviews are rigged because they're paid, but it's more about TOM bantering about vidya with Sara.

I read that as scat-slings

FUCKING LEAK

Space Dandy and Cowboy are a few of the animes I feel were more than acceptable to watch in english.

>Or you could wait 12 hours and watch it in the proper language
>that completely forgetting what Toonami is
Why the fuck would you even try using that as an argument for the American TV block sucking? News flash, kiddo: most people watching it don't give a shit about "the proper language."

>In the first episode, Jack faces down a robotic villain who scat-sings and wields a magical jazz flute as a weapon. In the opening of episode two, the demon Aku struggles out of bed like a cranky teenager
10/10 gold

Honestly most Watanabe anime have STRONG dubs. Something just always seems to click with them. Champloo and M&H's dubs aren't on the level of Bebop or Dandy, but they're up there.

NO. We will watch it as it comes out!

>Or you could wait 12 hours and watch it in the proper language

kek

You do realize what Toonami is for, right?

Spoonfeeding entry level show dubs to idiots who can't stream or torrent, right?

>Watching Space Dandy in Jap

Ahhahaahahahahahahah

>still no tf2 show

I'm still angry

they realized it was too much effort after putting out Expiration Date.