‘Blue-Eyed Samurai’: When the most epic series on television was born from the gaze of a baby | Culture

Some ideas come from the most unexpected places. The one Blue-eyed samurai emerged from the gaze of a newborn girl. No one imagined that her color would anticipate one of the most epic constructions of current television. The birth of that idea was atypical, as was the proposal of its creators for Netflix: the interracial couple formed by Amber Noizumi and Michael Green presented to the executives a drama set in the Edo period of Japan that, according to their description, mixed the bloody revenge of the Kill Billby Quentin Tarantino, with the musical Yentlwhere Barbra Streisand dressed as a man to study the Torah and become a rabbi.

Because, although the proposal sounded crazy, at its core there was a mechanism that is as old as fiction itself, the confrontation between opposites. Not only the one that exists between these very different films, but also that of the masculine world against the feminine, the western against the eastern, and animation against the classic hour-long television drama. An unexpected proposal that has ended up captivating critics and awards, winning the Emmy for best animated series on Saturday (against X-men ’97 either The Simpsons) at the first technical awards gala, as well as three other statuettes.

In the year in which it will sweep Shogun, Blue-eyed samurai should not go unnoticed. Its title and genre already lead the viewer to think of Kurosawa’s cinema, Harakiri (perhaps the best samurai film, and therefore the best film ever made) and also in the recent Disney+ Japan of 1600 series. Here, however, the one who takes up the katana is a woman, an attribute that is not even the worst burden on Mizu’s life. Because this cold, silent and accurate protagonist, heir to Clint Eastwood or Toshirô Mifune, has the bad luck of being mixed-race, half white and half Japanese. And those very Western blue eyes, in Japan in 1633, a time when the country closed its borders to the outside world, have led her to a life of total discrimination. To her peers she is impure, less than human, the only white person many will ever see in their lives. But this is the legend of how she hid as a man to claim deeply personal revenge against four white men.

In a samurai story, of course, there could be no epic without revenge, that concept that works so well on screen and that we should so avoid in real life. But in this story, that exploited subgenre also receives a twist. Revenge is only an excuse to (in addition to selling its argument to the general public) delve into the inscrutable pain of the protagonist. Resentment is the escape route in this revenge that actually pits her against herself, as well as against a country and an abusive society full of demons. A revenge against her personality and her race that is deeply personal in the lives of its creators. And all of this is accompanied by an interpretation that, if the universe were fair, would have been worthy of another nomination for actress Maya Erksine, already mentioned at the Emmys for her role in the film. Mr. and Mrs. SmithShe plays the best female swordsman in Japan.

But the idea didn’t spring from a sword, but from motherhood. When Koizumi and Green’s blue-eyed daughter was born 16 years ago, “I was ecstatic that my daughter had blue eyes – why was this happening to me? It led me to self-reflection on racial identity, on why I was so happy that my daughter had blue eyes – why was I happier that she looked white and not Asian? Why wouldn’t I want my daughter to look Asian like me?” she explained. the writer in an interview with AwardsDaily. Koizumi soon discovered that her experiences of being an Asian woman and finding her place in the world were also universal, that when translated into action fiction they could speak to the entire planet. Just as anyone’s experiences could be reflected in the romantic dislocation of Past lives or in the contained anger of Rowalthough they also speak from the Asian experience abroad.

Little by little, the couple was, of course, introducing new ideas into a Word document that started with a concept. Over the years, that small doubt became something gigantic. “But everything we thought about was impossible to film,” admits the father of the child, Michael Green, who had previously written scripts such as Logan, Blade Runner 2049 or Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot trilogy, as well as the underrated (and canceled) series Kingswhere he dared to mix a monarchy of modern millionaires with the biblical myth of David and Goliath. For what they were proposing to build, and although they had never tried it, animation was the perfect medium.

Because “writing is writing,” Green says, and animation is not a genre, Guillermo del Toro exclaimed at the Oscars. This is a field full of possibilities that, if exploited correctly, is not limited by money, but by imagination. To dive into it, you only need to get rid of prejudices (both from viewers and executives) and know that anything can be done with drawings. Blue-eyed samurai It is a production that takes advantage of that infinite technology. This pair of writers landed without prejudice to create a series with one-hour chapters (rare bird in the sector) and a rich landscape and mythology. But above all they tried to get away as much as possible from the anime clichés to invent their own visual vocabulary, with spectacular choreography and action. Animation is purely visual, and that grants unlimited possibilities.

The Netflix series is also an “adult” series, a label that sounds like it simply proposes violence and sex in a discriminatory and explicit way. A piece of advice: avoid series and films that only use sex and violence to be labeled “adult” and that makes them attractive to a type of audience that doesn’t see beyond that. Blue-eyed samurai It is a series for adults, in fact, because of the depth of its characters, its not at all Manichean villains (keep an eye out for that terrifying white character voiced by Kenneth Branagh himself) and the evolution of its supporting characters. Because of its arguments about prostitution, marriage and family. It is a series that, despite the showy games of revenge and travel, does not make it easy for the viewer who is looking at the mobile phone, and where each sequence is a narrative journey.

Sometimes great ideas come from the most unexpected places. And sometimes the best series come from the most atypical places. For example, from the Netflix back closet. Luckily, this adventure will have a second season, and, with time and viewers, it will not be buried like another premiere.