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Samurai Jack is Back

Jane

By Jane
in Culture Shock

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WhoBibbles Grand Master

WhoBibbles

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5 minutes ago, Hayden said:

#WhereIsHisWhiteAttireandSword

He probably got tired of how often those clothes ripped and gave him scars. Trident is a nice touch.

hearing jack's scream made me excited even more.

I fucking love these teasers.

 

Although man, I really do miss the sword so much.

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Hayden

Hayden

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Review 1: http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-return-of-samurai-jack-is-everything-you-wanted-an-1792788975

The new season’s darkness stretches well beyond just Jack’s inner turmoil. It is also reflected in the faction set up as one of Jack’s new foes: the Daughters of Aku, the mysterious female assassins we’ve seen hounding Jack in the trailers. Their introduction across the first two episodes paints as harsh and brutal a story for them as it does for Jack’s own, and when the Daughters finally clashes with Jack, it makes for a moment that rivals some of the best duels from any of the show’s four prior seasons.

But despite ensconcing itself within that familiar visual language of Samurai Jack, wordless action and clashing blades, it’s a sequence that also, for the first time, reveals that this is a more adult show, figuratively and literally. Jack wrestles with the act of spilling the blood of an actual fellow human being, rather than the Cartoon Network-sanctioned oil and goop of his past foes—another crucial step in the ongoing moral dilemma Jack faces, as he wrestles with abandoning the honor he holds dear to in his long-suffering attempt to defeat his mortal enemy.

Even with all this newfound maturity, both visually and symbolically, the first two episodes of Jack’s return help re-affirm that this is the show we all know and love, and it still has some of those lighter moments of kookier fun that call back to just how weird and wonderful the show could get. One villain we meet in the first episode is a flamboyant, scat-singing assassin who is just as excited to meet the legend that is Jack as he is to try and kill him (with a golem-controlling flute, to boot).

When Aku makes his brief appearances in either episode, he’s as wonderfully curmudgeonly and silly—and yet still deeply sinister—as he was all those years ago, even if fans will tragically miss his dearly departed voice actor, Mako Iwamatsu. Greg Baldwin, who voiced both Aku and Iwamatsu’s other beloved voice role, Avatar: The Last Airbender’s Iroh, in several projects after Iwamatsu’s death in 2006, steps in for the new season and does a great job, but it’s still sad not to hear Iwamatsu in the role. But in a way it’s sort of fitting for the show’s new tone that even its lighter moments are twinged with sadness. But they’re still fun moments, ones that are necessary to both balance the dark path Jack is heading on and keep us rooted in the Samurai Jack of old.

Review 2: http://collider.com/samurai-jack-season-5-review/#images

The fans who were wooed by the show’s artistry are older, and because Samurai Jack is now in a later time spot on Adult Swim, rather than the kid-friendly afternoon block, the tone can accommodate more mature material. But Tartakovsky isn’t much interested in blood and guts. Yes, there is plenty of blood, but it’s not over used. Instead, the emphasis is on Jack’s decaying mind, his waning will. Even the opening credits — once of Aku reciting the legend of how he flung his nemesis through a time portal to the future — is now told from Jack’s perspective, reinforcing a more psychological story.

Where this sometimes falters is when it needs to remind us that it is a cartoon with cheeky comedic moments. Samurai Jack was never really made for toddlers, but it still had flamboyance and outlandish characters like The Scotsman, the talking dogs, and Aku himself. So the shift from Jack’s mental purgatory to the hijinks of his adversaries aren’t always smooth, especially when some of these scenes would be considered grave by normal Hollywood standards. (See the mysterious masked women in the premiere episode and the one action Jack may not come back from in the second.)

Even when things are dark, the show is still fun in the way that Tartakovsky, his team of animators, and the writers have always approached scenes. It’s rarely a straight-on shot of an armored Jack riding his motorcycle (yes, a motorcycle) down a wooded road. We’re peering at him through an opening in the autumn tree tops above, or peeking his journey through the slits in a sea of trees, or watching a leaf fall limply into a running stream as his engine roars in the distance. In one of the more unique sequences, Jack is forced to do battle in the pitch black of a dark temple, illuminated only by the flickering glow of a firefly.

Review 3: http://nerdist.com/samurai-jacks-return-is-tougher-meaner-and-undeniably-cool/

Undoubtedly, Samurai Jack has aged very well in terms of its visuals. While keeping the basic Little Golden Books-style of artwork coupled with Spaghetti Western and manga references, everything seems much more mature, from the widescreen HD look of everything, to the way Jack is drawn slightly taller, slightly more angular. Even though he hasn’t aged the 50 years he’s spent in Aku’s future, his face shows the wear of ceaseless battle. All of this angst and torment has made the gorgeous open landscapes seem all the emptier, and Jack all the more singular in his quest.

The premiere episode is wall-to-wall action, and as with the previous seasons, Jack gets to take on a specialized, mouthy robot, which in this case is a sound-based warrior. One thing I’ve always loved about the show is how it allows for silence and ambient noise to be the only soundtrack for long stretches, and having a bad guy who uses sound as a weapon only punctuates how quiet the show is normally. It’s a brutal fight, and one that Jack might be too weary to win. Although it is just the first episode, we know this is going to be an uphill battle for the man who at one point seemed like the perfect, unstoppable warrior.

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JCM Mentor

JCM

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If anybody wants to learn more about the show, there's an interview with Tartakovsky I found about it that I posted to my website. Even though the interview was given around the time the show premiered, I still think his answers to the questions are pretty interesting.

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