The Seven Samurai
In 1954, an acclaimed film known as the Seven Samurai was released in Japan under the direction of Akira Kurosawa. The renowned film still receives much attention and prestige today for its excellent quality. Fast forward to the year 2004, fifty years later, and anime producers Gonzo introduce a new series known as Samurai 7. Director Toshifumi Takizawa took the classic concept and story from the original Seven Samurai film and made a few, ultimately minor, adaptations and changes. Furthermore, the twenty-six episode anime is longer than the original film allowing for additional plot and character developments.
It’ll Take Seven
The story behind both the film and the anime is that of bandits raiding a small rice village, harvest after harvest, growing increasingly demanding and violent. In the anime, this poor village is Kanna. During the most recent raid by the bandits, they not only took rice, but women and children, too. These aren’t just your run of the mill bandits, either – they are the Nobuseri, basically cyborg samurai. In the first episode of the series, entitled The Master, the villagers decide that enough is enough and that it’s time to resist the Nobuseri. The decision to fight back is made final by a village elder, but only with the help of samurai. Because the village is poor, they decide to try to hire a samurai with the offer of rice. Three villagers, Kirara, Rikichi, and Komachi decide to head into town to locate their warrior.
Besides the opening cutscene, this first episode gives you a glimpse into the interesting world that Takizawa and his crew have created for Samurai 7. It’s a strange but somehow refreshing blend of old world samurai meets sci-fi. The blend may seem forced or too awkward to work at first, but as the series unfolds the creators did a great job in tying these ideas together to produce and engaging tale.
Over the course of the next twenty-five episodes, six more unique samurai characters join the fold and work together to do battle against the Nobuseri. The skilled group eventually goes on to do much more than just defend the village and repel the Nobuseri – they take the fight to the Nobuseri in a series of intense battles. Not all samurai will survive, but will they have died in vain?
Slashing Their Way Onto Blu-ray
The Samurai 7 Complete Series Blu-ray set is nicely put together. The single box set includes three keep cases with a single disc each. Inside each case, printed on the reverse side of the cover art (so underneath the see-through plastic) is an episode summary that lists the episode name and a brief synopsis — a nice touch and preferable to a removable booklet.
All episodes are presented in 16:9 widescreen at 1080p and look great from a technical standpoint. As far as the animation of the show itself, I don’t have any significant complaints; additionally, I thought the mixture of 2D/3D animation that was done at times looked pretty darn good. For audio options, Funimation includes a complete English and Japanese 5.1 Dolby TrueHD track, as well as English subtitles.
One area where this Blu-ray release is lacking though is in the extra features. With this release you get just a couple of audio commentary tracks, textless songs, and some trailers – hardly anything to get excited about, and I think Gonzo and Funimation missed out here. Bringing Samurai 7 to Blu-ray was likely no small feat and it’s a shame that there aren’t more features to really flesh out this release as the content and presentation are more than up to the task for pleasing anime fans.
Conclusion
It’s great to see an anime classic like Samurai 7 come to Blu-ray in a nice box set. I think this is a nice release with the exception of the lack of more extra features. The packaging, presentation, and of course the classic anime content are all impressive, however. Even for someone like myself who hadn’t seen this series before nor watches very much anime, it was hard not to enjoy Takizawa’s anime masterpiece.