How the animated series “Blue Eye Samurai” achieved the magic of realism

For a global animation space where Japanese anime dominates, Blue Eyed Samurai Creators Michael Green and Amber Noizumi sought to stand out from the crowd early on with their Netflix series about a female swordsman seeking bloody vengeance in Edo-period Japan.

Their approach caught the attention of Emmy voters after Blue Eyed Samurai earned two nominations for Outstanding Animated Program and Outstanding Sound Editing for an Animated Comedy or Drama Series. Looking ahead to a second season, Green says that in terms of style and ambition, their series is aiming beyond clashing swords and blood splattering on brutal warriors and toward a vivid animation style with a live-action attitude to target adult fans of Game of Thrones Or The Crown.

“The goal was for people to completely forget that they’re watching an animated film, not to ask themselves, ‘How is this accomplished technically?’ but to realize that these characters have become real, as if they were live actors,” Green says.

Green and Noizumi teamed up with supervising director Jane Wu, a veteran storyboard artist on films like Mulan And Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and the Game of Thrones TV series — and Blue Spirit studio to bring their story to life in animation. Wu, an anime fan, wanted to go beyond traditional 2D animation, or the look of a video game or a Pixar animated story.

“We had to find a balance between [computer generation] “We love movies and anime, two things that people know and love, and we find a unique way for ourselves,” says Wu, who turned to Japan’s Bunraku puppet theater, which uses half-life-size dolls, to tell the story of Mizu (voiced by Maya Erskine), a biracial swordsman seeking revenge against four white men who made her a woman of shame because of her ice-blue eyes.

Wu embraced what she calls “2-and-a-half-D animation.” “The film relies on a live-action philosophy, 2D animation and painted maps, and 3D characters that are designed to look like 2D characters with some stylization,” she explains.

Another way to ground the narrative was to hire a stunt coordinator and focus on live camera angles, so the audience felt like they were following the characters and their body language in real time.

“The sequences had to look real, the characters had to feel like they were in danger, and the cameras had to be placed in the right places to capture movement,” Wu adds.

For Noizumi, as a woman who struggled with her half-Japanese, half-white identity, the success of Blue Eyed Samurai was very satisfying. “I was bothered by these feelings for a long time,” Noizumi says. “It wasn’t until we put pen to paper that I was able to connect with these emotions, and the fact that people responded gave me great pride.”

This article first appeared in the August issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, Click here to…