Animation can often be a tough nut for Netflix originals to crack, regardless of how well they end up being received by critics. Blue Eye Samurai is comfortably one of the finest episodic exclusives to hit the streaming service all year, but the early numbers are less than encouraging.
Since premiering yesterday, revenge-fueled story of a young warrior cutting a bloody swathe through any obstacles on her path to destiny has only cracked the Top 10 most-watched list in seven countries worldwide per FlixPatrol, despite carrying a perfect 100 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and boasting a star-studded cast that includes Maya Erskine, with George Takei, Masi Oka, Randall Park, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and Kenneth Branagh.
It’s ambitious, exciting, and awe-inspiring, so even though nobody seems to be checking it out for themselves, you can’t help but admire the grand designs director Jane Wu laid out to IndieWire.
“When I sat down, I said I wanted to do what Game of Thrones did for TV with this – the kind of epic, intimate, political, feature quality filmmaking. I didn’t want to skimp on not showing those wide shots and not showing more than two locations, and that’s what makes a show epic aside from the filmmaking aspect of seeing different parts of Japan, seeing different architecture, seeing different environments. I wanted to achieve a simple introduction of adult drama into animation that we do in the East all the time but you just have not seen here in the West.”
Blue Eye Samurai most definitely doesn’t deserve to be slept on, but unless those viewing figures improve over the next few days, we could end up talking about a genuine underrated and unheralded gem that should have found a much bigger audience than it did.