The Elements of Style: ‘Samurai Jack’
Spoiler-free arguments for why it’s one of the most artfully crafted shows in TV history.
It came back because its fans couldn’t live without it. For years after its 2004 cancellation, rumors swirled around how Samurai Jack would return and how Jack—a good samurai with a magic sword—would finally “return to the past and undo the future that is Aku,” an evil shape-shifting wizard. The show’s first four seasons made an immediate impression in the early 2000s because it didn’t look like anything else on the air. Other shows on the air at the time were packed with fight scenes and fun characters aplenty, but none of them captured a zeitgeist quite like Jack did. Luckily, we have a smart explanation as to why:
This excellent Digg video written by Christen Smith, an animation professor at New York University, explains why, and we’ve broken some of the reasons it gives down below, along with a bit of our own context. We encourage you to watch the video and read on for more about what made the show both artful and addicting from its premiere in 2001 to its return and conclusion in 2017.
A principled design aesthetic
This applies to the whole show, from the painterly rendering of its backgrounds to the clean, lean physique of its main character. But one of the most striking elements that Smith picks out for the video is that none of the action has a characteristic black line around it. This made everything way harder to animate. “Without the aid of a line to define the separation between character and environment,” Smith says, “the colors of the entire scene had to be carefully picked so that the action doesn’t get lost in the backgrounds.”
Additionally, Smith points out how every shot in the series emphasizes the principles of design:
• Harmony
• Balance
• Hierarchy
• Proportion
• Emphasis
• Contrast
Harmony and balance. Sure sounds like Jack, doesn’t it?
Animation filled with nonstop, fluid action
Low-budget shows from the old Hanna-Barbera shows like The Flintstones or Scooby-Doo, as well as more recent and script-driven comedy cartoons like Space Ghost Coast to Coast or Family Guy, rely heavily on a process known as “limited animation”—i.e. cutting a cartoon so that just the characters’ mouths or small pieces of a frame move, or reusing animation where it can serve the purposes of the show. For Samurai Jack—an action cartoon with a minimalist good-versus-evil premise and even more minimal dialogue—that was never going to fly. For years Tartakovsky, a trained animator, has repeated that Samurai Jack was his opportunity to do an action show that he wanted to watch. “I always complained about action shows,” he said at Annecy International Film Festival. “I’m going to do an action show the way I see it.” To him that meant stylized visuals, visual storytelling, minimal dialogue, and artistry in combination with “badass action.”
Storyboards that made the action sing
As storyboard artist Bryan Andrews put it on the Samurai Jack DVD extra material: “It gave us an opportunity to be kind of violent.” The opportunity to infuse swordplay and martial arts in practically every episode of a series was rare for American animation and remains so today.
The masters of murmurs, the deliverers of diction, the shoguns of shouts—some of the greatest voice actors in the universe
The first run of Samurai Jack episodes featured the voice talent of Phil LaMarr (Justice League, Pulp Fiction) as the heroic Jack and the legendary Mako Iwamatsu as Jack’s foe, Aku. Phil LaMarr brought a deep gravity to Jack’s steady, tormented samurai who would often play the straight man to the rest of the show’s other-worldly characters. Mako voiced Aku with a deft levity that could switch from throaty demonic crowing to offbeat comedy at the drop of a hat. Though Mako died in 2006, his Aku is memorable and still honored by the Greg Baldwin, the new Aku voice actor, who told The Dot and Line: “Mako was nominated for an Academy Award. Mako was nominated for a Tony. Mako was a great actor…I’m not anything like in his league.”
And, on Adult Swim, a new level of freedom
The return of Samurai Jack on Adult Swim retains all of these elements, with the added benefit of a later timeslot, an audience that’s grown up, and a TV-14 rating where there was once a Y7 rating. It’s still classic Jack, but everything’s dialed up.
H/T: Digg
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