Toon-arama: Samurai Jack (2001-2004)

You’ve probably never heard of Samurai Jack. Samurai Jack is a cartoon by Genndy Tartakovsky that appeared on the Cartoon Network between 2001 and 2004. It’s brilliant. But I’m not entirely sure if I should recommend it. Why not? Well, let’s discuss.

To answer this question, let us begin with a more basic question: what is Samurai Jack? Hm. Good question. Here’s the backstory. Jack is a young prince and Samurai from Feudal Japan. Jack’s father’s empire is destroyed by a demon named Aku. Jack takes his father’s magical sword and defeats Aku. However, before Jack can kill Aku, Aku sends them both through a time portal to a dystopian future ruled by Aku. Jack must now battle his way until he can find and kill Aku and find a time portal home. Aku, meanwhile, is hoping to see Jack killed before they fight again.

So if that’s the backstory, then what is the show about? Well, that’s where this gets a little hazy. In each episode, Jack fights robots, aliens, gangsters, demons, ghosts, an evil himself or whatever Tartakovsky felt Jack should be fighting that week. And although each of the episodes is ostensibly part of the same story, they bare little connection in that they are rarely episodic. So for the most part, it doesn’t actually matter what order you watch them in, though over time, they do kind of add up to a mythology.

This is both a problem and a moment of genius. The problem is this: when you start watching the show, little of it makes sense. There does not appear to be a purpose, i.e. no overriding story. The episodes don’t seem to contribute to “the story” either. Things happen too that don’t seem to relate to anything or that aren’t explained. And they are rarely addressed in the following episode. So unless you have an extremely high tolerance for ambiguity, you are going to hate this show and will probably quit after a couple of episodes.

But if you can stand the ambiguity, then one day you will have an epiphany: even though they have never once laid out the story... even though none of the episodes contribute to the story... even though nothing in the show seems to be related, you will one day realize that you have a total grasp of the storyline and you know exactly what is going on. It’s almost bizarre when you realize that you know this, because you have no idea how you ever learned it. That’s a pretty special feeling. And more to the point, at that point, you come to see just how brilliant this storyline is and how it has built.

And that brings us to the second issue. Like the first, this issue is a major strike against for most viewers, but a huge selling point for the others. This issue is that most of the episodes are essentially knock-offs of something else. For example, you may have an episode that mirrors A Fistful of Dollars one week, and then you get Pulp Fiction the next. It’s never that blatant that you feel like they are copying those films, but what you get is a visual style, pacing and “mood” that mirrors those films. In effect, Tartakovsky has stylized these films, distilled the style into its most potent form and then written that as an episode of Samurai Jack. The result is absolutely brilliant for film buffs. Indeed, it’s totally fantastic to tune in to each episode and see something completely unlike anything else you’ve seen in the series and then spend your time trying to figure out what Tartakovsky has done this time. Hurray!

But on the other hand, this will also be totally disconcerting to the vast majority of people. One of the things most people crave in a television show is consistency. Even something like The Twilight Zone which presented a wild array of unrelated storylines each week still made sure to provide key anchors to create consistency: Rod Serling’s introduction, similar film styles, similar costumes, similar actors and acting styles, consistent writing. Without those things, people quickly become confused about what exactly it is they are supposed to be watching. Samurai Jack really dances along that line with different storylines seemingly set in different worlds and different film styles, e.g. shooting in frames versus traditional setups versus color-coding your scenes, etc. The only consistency is Jack, and he’s largely mute with little in the way of character. In fact, there's almost no dialog.

This is why I struggle to recommend this. Personally, I think it’s brilliant. I loved seeing what Tartakovsky could come up with each week, especially after it all started to make sense to me. But for most people, this will be beyond their tolerance for ambiguity, and I can’t say that they are wrong. In many ways, Samurai Jack is an experimental cartoon and for some it will have worked swimmingly. For others, it was a total loss.

Thoughts?