“Blue Eye Samurai” is an adult animated action series streaming on Netflix and is one of the better streaming series in the platform.
So let’s dive into some trivia and facts about the series.
- Blue Eye Samurai is an American adult animated action streaming television series
- It is created and written by husband and wife team Michael Green and Amber Noizumi
- The series is animated by French company Blue Spirit
- The series is set in 17th-century Edo-period Japan
- Blue Eye Samurai follows Mizu, a mixed-race master of the sword who lives a life in disguise seeking to deliver revenge.
- In 17th-century Japan, when borders are closed to the outside world, citizens would never see a face that was not Japanese
- Except in rare cases of illegal trade
- Our hero, Mizu (Erskine), knows there were only four white men in Japan at the time of her birth and sets off to kill these men
- One of whom might be her father, who made her a “creature of shame”
- But revenge is not an option for women
- So Mizu must forge her revenge quest while hiding her gender as well as her blue eyes
- The series was released on November 3, 2023 on Netflix
- The series consists of 8 episodes
- The first episode was released on November 1
- The episode was released two days earlier, on Netflix’s YouTube channel
- A special version of episode 6 was released on November 15, 2023 on the Netflix YouTube channel
- It features a largely black-and-white palette
- It also has an altered soundtrack
- The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 100% critic rating
- With an average rating of 8.10 out of 10
- Based on 13 reviews
- The website’s critics consensus says: “Visually dazzling while paying deft attention to character, Blue Eye Samurai is a masterfully rendered animated adventure”
- Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 86 out of 100
- Based on 5 critics
- Indicating “universal acclaim”
- Mizu is voiced by Maya Erskine
- Mizu is the titular blue-eyed samurai, she is a half-Japanese, half-White swordmaster who has sworn herself to a quest of vengeance
- Mizu was born in Japan around 1637-38 to a Japanese woman who was raped by a white Western trader
- Shortly after her birth, Mizu was targeted by an assassination attempt, which claimed her mother’s life instead
- She was given to a maid
- They posed as her mother, by an unknown individual, and taken into hiding at the fishing village of Kohama
- As a child, she lived with her ‘mother’ in a hut at the edge of the village, forbidden to go out or the ‘bad men’ would find her
- Though they had moments of warmth, her ‘mother’ became Increasingly addicted to opium at the brothel she worked at
- Hitting and reprimanding Mizu if she even went near the windows
- She eventually shaved Mizu’s head to make her resemble a boy
- Since she claimed the ‘bad men’ would be looking for a girl
- Her most notable feature is her rounded blue eyes were usually only depicted in oni or other dangerous supernatural beings in Japanese folklore
- Her hut was set aflame
- She escaped, but having heard her ‘mother’ screaming and unable to find her afterward, assumed she was dead
- The town children, led by Taigen, mercilessly bullied her
- Eventually chasing her to a cliff’s edge during a rainstorm and tearing off the mask
- Comparing her eyes to a dog’s and calling her ‘mother’ a whore who killed herself for bedding a “white devil”
- That night she met the blind sword-smith Eiji
- He later became her mentor
- Her regular attire, a male disguise consists of orange tinted spectacles with round frames, to mask her blue eyes, dark grey arm warmers, a dark blue haori tied with a lighter blue obi, baggy black trousers, with darker black stockings and sandals, a white scarf tied around her neck to disguise her lack of Adam’s apple (which she later exchanges for Taigen’s orange scarf) and a plain brown kasa (large hat) with a dark blue cape
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