Blue Eye Samurai Review

Blue Eye Samurai is not, strictly, anime, and it belongs in this list because it would embarrass most of what is. The animation, by the French studio Blue Spirit, is extraordinary, with sword fights choreographed and cut like the best live action and a painterly treatment of light and weather that gives every episode a sense of place. Mizu is a magnificent protagonist, driven and damaged and funny in a dry way, and the show is honest about what her single mindedness costs the people who try to love her.

The supporting cast is superb, from the cheerful apprentice Ringo to the princess Akemi, whose parallel story about a woman with no power in a world of men is as strong as the main one. The violence is graphic and earned. The season's final stretch in Edo is a masterpiece of escalation. It is only faulted for a cliffhanger ending that a second season has been slow to resolve, and for a villain who is more function than person.