For “Blue Eye Samurai” creators Amber Noizumi and Michael Green, animation was the only way to tell their story the right way.
The creative partners wrote and sold the now-acclaimed Netflix series with animation in mind, and recalled to TheWrap that despite one possible buyer gauging live action possibilities, they couldn’t envision the show any other way.
“When we pitched it, we pitched it as an animated drama,” Green said. “Only one place we pitched it to said, ‘Well, would you consider it in live action?’ It was actually the very nice executives at Apple. Our response was, ‘This is an animated show.’ We didn’t know how to tell this story until we locked on animation. That was the medium for this.”
The choice for animation has paid off. The series netted nominations for Outstanding Animated Program and Outstanding Sound Editing for a Comedy or Drama Series (Half-Hour) and Animation. The Netflix original has also already chalked up a few Emmy wins. They led Juried Emmy winners with Character Design, Production Design and Storyboard.
Noizumi mentioned FX’s “Shogun” – which also earned a fair share of accolades this Emmy season – as a show set partially in the same period. One show works as a live action series while theirs still needed that animated flare.
“We always knew it was going to be animated because of that slight suspension of reality,” she said. “Now watching ‘Shogun,’ which is a beautiful show and exists partially in that time period, our show just still wouldn’t have worked.”
Green added that their show wasn’t going for “that documentary feel.”
“While we’re definitely set in a historical time and place and give a lot of credence to historical accuracy, the heightened nature of animation allowed us to take the story – I shouldn’t say elevate but it bent the storytelling in a direction that was going to be unique to itself,” he said.
The episode selected for Emmy consideration was “The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride.” It comes at the midpoint of the season and juggles the final reveal of Mizu’s (Maya Erskine) bleak backstory with a present day conflict of her fending off a number of combatants. Both Noizumi and Green agreed that it was lucky the episode that best encapsulated everything great about “Blue Eye Samurai” also happened to be a fan-favorite.
“I think that episode specifically really showcased the cultural aspects of our show, the very personal emotional aspects, and the intense all-out fight scenes,” Noizumi said. “I think it really kind of went all-out on each level. Our artists really just put their all into it.”
Green added, “It’s arguably the most emotional episode and not for nothing because Amber wrote the s–t out of it. On any show I’ve worked on, you never know which is the episode audiences are going to respond most to. There’s always one they pick as ‘that’s the one.’ This one we happened to feel the same way about because for us when we saw it together for the first time, every aspect of the show just hit and came together. The orchestra was playing as a unit.”
“Blue Eye Samura” Season 1 is streaming in full on Netflix.