Blue Eye Samurai and Scavengers Reign Opened Up New Horizons for Adult Animation

Where a lot of American adult animated shows focus on the explicit or taboo nature of what’s being shown rather than how it’s aesthetically represented — take the stammering comedy and splatter sci-fi of Rick and Morty, for one generationally influential example — the likes of Blue Eye Samurai and Scavengers Reign are arrestingly different. They’re striking for their visual experimentation, their use of a roaming 3D animation camera and the graphic textures of traditional 2D.

Blue Eye Samurai’s a hybrid of live-action pre-visualization, while Scavengers Reign leans into more classical inspirations. But they’re both that rare beast of adult animation: original works. The two series sit highly among my very favorite shows of the year for their sense of invention, and give me some hope that adult animation will continue to show an interest in the different ways the medium can directly evoke more mature conversations.

This isn’t to say that the work in a comedy show like Rick and Morty isn’t at all artful; it simply has different priorities, ones which have been taken up by a vast swath of the animation landscape. (It’s important to say that such differences are also informed by the artists’ time and budget, not just intent). More importantly, these two standouts aren’t based on any existing properties. At a time when adult animation has been dependent on familiarity — whether that’s tonal and visual proximity to something like Rick and Morty through various bug-eyed characters, or audience familiarity through the leveraging of recognizable IP (e.g., Harley Quinn or Castlevania NocturneBlue Eye Samurai and Scavengers Reign met with such enthusiasm. (Of course, as streaming goes, we may never know the true metric of their popularity, but the former’s already been renewed).

Created by Michael Green and Amber Noizumi, Blue Eye Samurai adopts the cadence and rhythm of live-action prestige television, right down to its hour-long episodes. The show has been mistakenly characterized as ‘anime’ by some. And while the character design in this American-French co-production is stylized, it doesn’t exactly follow the aesthetics that are implied by the term.

Blue Eye Samurai’s embrace of graphic touches in its 3D animation sometimes feels of a piece with Netflix’s other adult animation smash hit Arcane. But more than that show, Green and Noizumi favor naturalistic acting and live-action reference as a baseline for the show’s action choreography, while using the animated canvas to blur the line between the real, tangible world and hallucinatory inner spaces — of memory, or simply of pure focus. There’s varied perspectives and experiments in where to place the camera in a fight sequence, playing with the dimensions that 3D can enable.

One storyboard artist, Toniko Pantoja, talks in fascinating detail about how following live-action visual rules changed their usual process, how the camera began to be treated as a tangible object, and how they considered real-life lens effects — grounding effects to the usual hyperreal freedom of animation. It’s worth considering how that makes Blue Eye Samurai so different, but those restrictions don’t feel like restrictions when you’re watching the show, rather a new way of perceiving and portraying tactility in animation. Its hybridization clarified something I have felt about adult animation in general — that with the already precarious nature of making a series within that niche, such exciting visual experimentation feels rarer still.

The show itself is a revenge tale situated in Edo Japan, during an era of isolationism, its borders closed to all foreigners, and high value placed on social propriety. Mizu (Maya Erskine) is visibly mixed race courtesy of her blue eyes, and a pariah within the series’s social context. It feels extreme to the point of absurdity, but perhaps that’s the point. “All metal wants to be a sword,” says Mizu’s swordsmith Master Eiji.

It’s an ironically rather blunt metaphor that announces Blue Eye Samurai as a story about resisting conformity, primarily through Mizu’s mixed-race heritage being shunned by all who see her blue eyes, inherited from her white father. But it’s evident through the roles that women are made to play in the patriarchal structures enforced by the feudal system. The daughter of a lord is bartered off to old men for the promise of a big dowry, a woman’s permit to enter a city is invalid because her husband is dead, so she’s doomed to freeze outside the gates with her child; these are but the earliest examples.

Mizu’s quest is tied to her very heritage, an act of revenge against the circumstances of her mixed-race birth, looking to kill all four of her possible white fathers. It recalls Lady Snowblood, which also inspired Kill Bill, another story Blue Eye emulates — the show even uses Hotei’s “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” score cue, just like Quentin Tarantino did. (It has other similarly playful needle drops, like Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls,” covered by Emi Mayer).

But even Tarantino’s yakuza pastiche was more cartoonish in its construction — you’ll find none of the same floaty movement in Blue Eye Samurai. This is instead built with a sense of realistic movement that’s expressive nonetheless. It’s full of resplendent color design, bold but not overwhelming. The backgrounds are strong overall with their painterly touches, like how indigo paint on the wall of a brothel gives the place a cosmic touch.

Compared to the lush landscapes and decadent palaces and vivid washes of blood in Blue Eye Samurai, the other best adult animated show of the year, Scavengers Reign, feels a little more stripped down, but it’s no less gorgeous. It's more about observation than action, watching the strange creatures of an alien planet go about their business as often as it follows its human cast.

Building on their 2016 indie short film Scavengers, show creators Joe Bennett and Charles Huettner take inspiration from the art style of the French illustrator and designer Moebius (a pseudonym for Jean Giraud) in the depiction of its peculiar setting. Nothing currently airing looks quite like it. It follows the crew of the Demeter, an interplanetary colonist ship that gets marooned on an uninhabited planet. On its strange surface they try to survive and find a means of escape, while contending with an incredibly hostile (but beautiful) landscape.

While they share a similarly adventurous creative spirit, both shows take very different routes to embodying their thematic interests through their art style. Blue Eye invites comparison between the archaic practices of its historical fiction and the hypocrisies that persist to the present day — not just through its modern-day needle drops but also by bringing the acting of its characters as close to the real world as possible, without forsaking animation’s expressive potential.

The animation in Scavengers Reign is also naturalistic, but in service of creating discomfort through the rather punishing physical traumas that the characters go through, and a sense of uncanniness through how it depicts the behaviors of the planet’s native creatures in intensive detail. But it’s also light on action sequences, opting instead for more decompressed science fiction drama, along with a rather healthy dose of horror. Minds fracture under pressure, the explorers deal with some of the gnarliest injuries imaginable, and all of it links back to the failures of their personal lives.

Neither of these shows is “adult” solely in the sense that they’re lurid or explicit, but because they balance this with quiet and patience, and even sensuality. They don’t just take on these themes, they investigate how their visual construction emphasizes those interests, and portray them without any words being spoken.

That said, it’s not like adult animation is a dying notion, fated to put out derivative comedies in perpetuity. Despite existing in an increasingly precarious streaming landscape (Max has been removing a lot of shows in their entirety), series like Primal and Undone show up every year — the former, directed by Samurai Jack creator Genndy Tartakovsky, is an electric, brutal adventure through a mythical prehistory, told mostly without dialogue. The latter series built a psychological drama out of rotoscoping and a great lead performance from Rosa Salazar.

This year, tie-in series like Castlevania Nocturne provided an avenue for adult animation with a safety net, playing on nostalgia or a pre-existing audience through bloodier takes on popular genre fiction. The rather lavish Castlevania specifically plays with the look and feel of anime, as does the eclectic Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, which playfully incorporates the textures of old-school video games alongside its reinterpretation of well-known characters. Though a bit rougher around the edges, Prime Video’s Invincible, is an enjoyable send-up of superhero cartoons that emulates their look, sensitive toward its characters’ inner lives while portraying their fights with rather discomforting brutality, as the series works its way towards a point about consequentialism.

Along with Blue Eye Samurai and Scavengers Reign, they’re cases that highlight an important part of adult animation: that even in unpacking the ugliness of ‘adult’ problems, animation can be adult and beautiful. And both shows demonstrate a palpable excitement about doing this in a way that feels new. More than just the mention and implication of sex and violence, such animated series push the envelope through how they frame these human concerns and communicate these emotions by creating something visually poetic, and not just provocative.

Kambole Campbell is a freelance writer for Empire Magazine, Little White Lies, Sight and Sound, Hyperallergic, and CartoonBrew. And here!