The Elusive Samurai

Episode 8

If anything disappointed me about “A Perverted Kid and Disturbances of Holy Power”, it is that nothing in the episode comes close to living up to the insane potential of that episode title. It makes it sound like we're about to get a cursed Crayon Shin-chan multiverse crossover or something, and instead, we get a tense and occasionally even harrowing nighttime assault on an isolated village that feels like something straight out of the samurai-themed Assault on Precinct 13 prequel that John Carpenter never got to make. What a shame. Imagine the sick insults that Shinnosuke could have dropped on the Dang-Ass Freaks that Tokiyuki and the gang go up against this week. Dammit, now my brain has been poisoned by the thought of what kind of deranged body horror that Yūsei Matsui could get up to with Shin-chan's “elephant” powers…

Wait, that's right, the new Elusive Samurai episode. It's really good! There are few things more satisfying than watching a scrappy band of warriors use their tenacity and wits to outmaneuver and outsmart an army of bloodthirsty bastards. Unsurprisingly, The Elusive Samurai does a great job of dramatizing the conflict with the bright red blood, frantic action, and wacky humor you'd expect from the show. What I dig about the episode is how it married with atmosphere of the frigid, nighttime setting and the propulsive back and forth between the three different prongs of the fight — Kojiro and Ayako pair up to lure Shokan into a close-quarters duel with Tokiyuki while Fubuki take on Shokan's underlings. It's great stuff, and incredibly fun to watch unfold.

All of that is despite the episode's strange artistic decisions. While the animation is still mostly excellent, there are some very strange transitions to often clunky-looking CGI models that make me worry about what the CloverWorks crew is going through to get these episodes out of the door. The horseback scenes I can understand going the computer-generated route with, even if I don't love how they look; horses are notoriously difficult to animate, and there was a lot of equestrian combat in this period of history. Some random cuts of Shokan and the Elusive Warriors go full CG for seemingly no reason at all and most of them stick out like a sore thumb. There is the occasional cut that benefits from the more detailed (and presumably motion-captured) 3D rigs, like when Shokan first stares down Tokiyuki after falling into the kids' trap. Mostly, though, it makes the whole episode feel sloppier than it ought to.

Thankfully, the episode is more than capable of rising above such limitations with the strength of the battle, overall. A lot of credit can probably go to Shokan, who is one hell of a weirdo villain, and that's by The Elusive Samurai's already warped standards. The CGI-ant motif is weirder than it is captivating but the dude's borderline fetishistic love of mutilating war orphans and then selling them into slavery is…well, it's supremely fucked up, but in a way that works for this anime's whackadoo tone. The stylized portraits of bloodied children that get projected onto Shokan's drooling grin are genuinely disturbing, serving as yet another instance of the show pulling back the curtain on its candy-colored video-game façade to remind its viewers that this century was just an unbelievably shitty time to be alive.

It's also great to see Tokiyuki developing his unique fighting style. I love how Fubuki frames the boy's gentle nature as an inherently dangerous — even deadly — weapon. This is a cruel, bloodthirsty, and unrelenting world that the Elusive Warriors are fighting for. These children lack the wisdom and experience to match their adult opponents in either ferocity or raw hunger for power. What else can a warrior-in-training hope to do than try to meet such an evil force with an equal and opposite power of their own? Kill 'em with kindness, indeed.

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The Elusive Samurai is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.