Jane Wu (‘Blue Eye Samurai’) explains how 200-year-old puppets inspired the look of the Netflix show [Exclusive Video Interview]

Jane Wu knew that she couldn’t use an anime style for the look of “Blue Eye Samurai” since it was ground that had been well-covered in the past. To give the series its distinctive look, she looked to the 200-year-old art form of Bunraku puppets. “These puppets are about three feet tall. They’re about close to 100 pounds and they’re operated by two to three puppeteers. And these puppets don’t tell kids stories. They tell very adult stories back in the day when you didn’t have television,” she tells Gold Derby during our Meet the Experts: TV Animation panel (watch the exclusive video interview above). Wu also found herself returning to one of her favorite anime films specifically in reference to the line quality. “One of my favorite anime movies of all time is ‘Tekkonkinkreet’ and I kept going back to study that for many reasons and one of it was for a lot of the line quality that they had.”

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“Blue Eye Samurai” is an adult animated program that is currently airing its first season on Netflix. It takes place during the Edo period of Japan in the 1600s and focuses on a female samurai, Mizu, who is half-white and half-Japanese. Mizu seeks vengeance against four white men, including her father, who have illegally stayed in Japan after the country closed its borders off from outsiders. The show was created by Amber Noizumi and Michael Green and features the voice talents of Maya Erskine, Masi Oka, Darren Barnet, George Takei, Randall Park, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Kenneth Branagh.

The action sequences in the show proved to be some of the most challenging to animate because of the grounded and intense nature of the fighting. “One of the things I wanted to do was to keep the camera not moving when we were doing these dramatic dialogue scenes because it also harkens back to the culture in the stillness and the silence of it all.” When the action comes, Wu made sure that the audience was able to feel the power of everything that was happening on screen. “That definitely was very complicated to do because those are all real martial arts movements that the stunt team shot out and choreographed and so the animators had to go and do your eyeball rotoscope thing and make sure that the action aspect of it was also animated to the movements as authentic as possible.”

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