Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s the plan:

• 1. Creating the sound of Samurai Champloo.

• 2. Animation news.

With that, let’s go!

1. Tension

Hip hop and old Japan have a link. It goes back decades and decades.

There’s a reason Wu-Tang Clan members rapped about “swinging swords like shinobi” in the ‘90s, and Liquid Swords opened with the words, “When I was little, my father was famous. He was the greatest samurai in the empire.” Or look at Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog, or even the Samurai Jack title sequence.1

Mixing these worlds feels cool — but also right, somehow, as if they belong together. It’s possible they do. “In feudal times, it didn’t matter what others said, and samurai would determine their own fate with their own sword,” a Japanese director once argued. Many back then were “aggressive about expressing themselves,” he believed, in a way “very similar to rappers.”2

The Japanese director in question was Shinichiro Watanabe. These thoughts were occupying his mind a few years after he finished Cowboy Bebop (1998–1999).

It was during the early ‘80s, during high school, that Watanabe first got into hip hop. He liked The Message (1982). “And then a little later … I got very interested in the new-school style of hip hop,” he recalled, “the music of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers.”

He favored “underground” stuff — grimier and less “major-label-sounding,” he said. Watanabe used that type of music in a Cowboy Bebop episode never aired abroad: Mish-Mash Blues. Beats by Tsutchie, a Japanese hip hop producer, play in the background. Even a track with rapping appears.3

Watanabe was hunting for a different sound. “I was convinced that hip hop music could be used in soundtracks,” he said. “Some of my other staff said that it was too much of a risk to use just hip hop [laughs]. I shot back, ‘If you think like that we might as well just have normal movie music’ [laughs].”

By the early ‘00s, an idea had taken hold of Watanabe. He wanted to make a new series with hip hop at its core — one about feudal samurai. There was a link between the two worlds, he said. These thoughts led to Samurai Champloo (2004–2005).