Samurai Champloo: Postmodern Anime

The anime Samurai Champloo is totally Postmodern.





Even the word "champloo" used in this instance means "a mixture of" or "something mixed". Meaning they combine Edo period events with contemporary sensibilities. Such as the following!

-Stylized graffiti, guns, rapper hand gestures, beat-boxers, guys walking around with wood over their shoulders like boom boxes, obvious gang-warfare (or, in Japanese, yakuza). The producers are well aware of the mixing of time periods and address it at some points with statements along the lines of "We know. We're doing it for a reason. Just go with it."

-The main characters MST themselves in the beginning. Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (1988-1999). Also self-referencing the show and the storyline. Metanarrative!

-This particular episode (18: "War of the Words") is about language/interpretation of language/learning of language. Mugen, one of the main characters, can't read. While they're in a city, he's basically kidnapped by a drunk schoolmaster and put through language bootcamp where he learns to read *Hiragana. It is also about image and image through the shape of language. Mugen learns language, then creates his own symbol meaning "Mugen". Then there's the whole signifier/signified shabang when at the end of the episode, where he labels everything by writing on objects with their corresponding word. Meanwhile, there's a gang war going on where the competition consists of trying to out-do each other by graffiting or "tagging" the most dangerous spots around the city. Behold, the power of words as symbols carrying more meaning than the usually associated because of who painted them where.

(*Note that the Japanese have four different alphabets. Katagana, which is used for forgien words, Hiragana, mainly used for Japanese words, Romanji, or the Romanization of Japanese sounds, and Kanji, the complicated pictorial characters used to mean entire words or parts of words. Most of these were ganked from the Chinese alphabet. You could go all kinds of crazy with this, but I'm tired, so NO.)