Samurai 7 Limited Edition DVD Bundle (Hyb) Reviews of this title:
Nick Roseberry - Feb 22 2007 nick@carrolltoday.net
Rating: Pretty good!
Mech-slicing samurai action
Samurai 7 is a quasi-futuristic twist on the 1954 Akira Kurosawa classic Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai). It is a story about Kanna, a rice village annually terrorized by a group of bandits who take nearly all of the crop as well as their women and children. The village elder decides enough is enough. They need to hire samurai in order to defeat the bandits, however with no money and only rice to offer as payment, hungry samurai is the only option.
Three villagers travel to the city to look for willing samurai and after finding several, and having a few run-ins with the local government, they return to Kanna to make preparations for the ensuing battle with the bandits.
The samurai train the farmers to use weapons, build walls and construct a giant cross-bow to defeat the towering mech-samurai bandits. This is the basic synopsis of the original film minus the huge robots.
The story then becomes integrated with other plot lines and the rest of the anime becomes an original piece. Fans of the 1954 film may have mixed feelings, but I felt director Toshifumi Takizawa did a nice job at retaining Kurosawa's original feeling.
Animation is top notch for most episodes (a couple feature a weird, sketch-like style) and the CGI ships mechs, and explosions look nice. Tons of action.
FUNimation did a good job in the dubbing and the English voice actors do a great job retaining the core personalities of the samurai from the original film. DBZ fans should note, the robot-samurai Kikuchiyo is voiced by Christopher Sabat, who also voiced Piccolo. Sabat, I felt, did wonderful in making that character the most memorable of the series.
Inuyasha-heads may notice that the music in Samurai 7 is nearly identical to that of Inuyasha, it works but can be distracting at times.
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