For those who have seen the ending of Afro Samurai you'll know it actually left the door open for some continuation, so as we pick up on this feature film made 2 years after the mini-series I kinda figured it would follow in those steps. Not really. It ain't a bad thing but this movie does kinda fiddle fuck with the history of events and "canon" of the series, not in an insultingly stupid way it just adds more stuff that wasn't seen before and has a purpose for the movie. So the events follow Afro who after claiming the Number 1 headband is being hunted down by familiar faces from his past who desecrate his father's grave on top of that, and more so than the show in my opinion this really hammers the point home of revenge. It damn near walks hand in hand with Kill Bill, I just kept flashing back to that, if you seek revenge on others someone is eventually going to seek revenge on you. Hurt people hurt people. It is nothing but a vicious cycle with no end, and you already know how I feel about that. Revenge...the most worthless of causes. And that story is told super well here, spanning only 100 minutes the movie starts off very slap dash and a little confusing as to what the plot is shaping up to be, but it quickly focuses and gets going passing by in the blink of an eye and you get some visuals out of it. Obviously the animation style persists, but with a movie budget so you get a lot broader more involved fights with some damn good background scenery. It maybe took 3 shots until I saw something where I was like, "God. Damn!! That looks good!". You ever wonder why I champion animation so hard here? Because you get some atmospheric/environmental shots the likes of which even God has never seen! And I gotta admit seeing a lot more locales and pieces of this world were greatly interesting to me, making me wish it went on longer than it did because it's just cool! Is it necessary viewing? Not in my estimation but if you digged the hell out of the show you'll like the movie just fine. The plot moves at a good pace and has some solid moments, the animation still looks interesting, the music once again done by The RZA I truly need to listen to in full for both these installments, and I gotta admit the voice cast was in some cases better than the show. It's unequivocally different and doing it's own thing and for all I know we could get another addition to this series in the not too distant future, which I'm not completely against. So I give it 3 stars, 7/10, and it is time for a recent show to be discussed. Rare occurence on this site but I'm looking forward to it so see you tomorrow.
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