Blue Eye Samurai has been nominated for two Emmy awards this year, and we got to talk with the creative team behind the animated series all about their thoughts! Blue Eye Samurai made its debut with Netflix last Fall and suddenly got the attention of anime and animation fans as a whole. The series introduced fans to Mizu, a samurai who was on a distinct path to revenge and the eight episode first season teased a much larger story at play. It was such a success that the series quickly nabbed all sorts of recognition and awards shortly after its release.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Blue Eye Samurai has been nominated for two Emmy awards, Outstanding Sound Editing for a Comedy or Drama Series (Half-Hour) and Outstanding Animated Program for the fifth episode, “The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride.” To celebrate its major nominations, ComicBook got the chance to speak with three of the minds behind the hit animated series, Executive Producers Amber Noizumi and Michael Green and Supervising Director Jane Wu.
In our talk (which has been edited for length and clarity), the minds behind Blue Eye Samurai open up about their reactions to its award recognition, their potential place within the anime and animation world, bringing its action to life, telling a new side of Mizu’s story, and even offered an update on the now in the works Season 2 with Netflix. Read on for our interview with the minds behind Blue Eye Samurai!
Reacting to Emmy Nominations
NICK VALDEZ, COMICBOOK: I know you’ve probably been asked this a million times today, but I gotta know too. How does it feel to get these Emmy nominations for Blue Eye Samurai? I know it’s been a very great year for animation, but also highly competitive.
AMBER NOIZUMI: It feels not bad. We were truly surprised, and we just didn’t know what to think. I think that’s how I take our show. People were gonna love it or they were gonna hate it, and, people seem to love it. If they hate it, I don’t wanna know about it. And that we were noticed, in the Academy, was a big honor. We’re honored and grateful.
What goes into choosing an episode to put up for consideration? Was it someone at Netflix that submits the series, or do you all get a say in which episode to actually highlight as the big one?
MICHAEL GREEN: It’s a conversation with a bunch of different people. There are so many values in the show, and different episodes hold them in different proportion. And [“The Tale of the Ronin and The Bride”] kind of held all the things that we were proud of, most interested in the show in evenest proportion. And so it just kinda came that way, but it was a conversation.
Directing The Emmy Nominated Episode
Interestingly enough, it’s also the episode where, Michael, you and Amber share different duties. So Michael, when in the process did you decide to direct this episode?
GREEN: I mean, first of all, I have to say that me “directing” should be in big air quotes. It’s animation, which I’m new to. Me directing that episode is very much a partnership with Jane, who held my hand every step of the way, when I wasn’t even aware of it. That was when she carried me, as the saying goes. But, you know, going to the writing, Amber and I knew in the arc of the season that this episode was gonna tell a braided tale of three stories, that we were gonna do some sort of bunraku show, puppetry show, that we were gonna tell how Mizu got out of the impossible situation we’d put her in in the previous episode, and we were gonna tell some secret origin story of her.
We also knew that Amber was gonna write that one solo and that needed her sensibility, unmediated by anyone else’s. And, I just fell in love with the story and said, “I’m gonna shotgun that one and put myself in a job I have no business doing and do my best to earn the title director,” which I’m not sure I did. But again, I also knew that it would be safer to do because by then we’d be further enough along in our season that I knew we have this team that’s so strong that they could support a director who had no idea what they were doing. And that’s what happened.
Writing The Emmy Nominated Episode
When I originally saw the episode, I almost took it as like a what if scenario. I thought Mizu was so under duress in that moment that it was like there were these flashes of another life until it all came together thematically. Like, “Oh, this is actually Mizu’s past.” And so, it all clicked for me. So Amber, when did this element of Mizu’s past come together in the design process for Mizu as a whole when writing the episode?
NOIZUMI: We wanted to portray a life that Mizu could have had…that she could have had happiness were it not for, people betraying her based on her race or her gender. That she she wants to be happy. That she’s not just a psychopathic revenge monster. That this is internalized hatred from other people. She is broken, when you’re broken, you also maybe can be fixed. So it just would deepen our understanding of Mizu.
We just, in Episode 4, watched her kill, basically a child, and we need to understand how does somebody like Mizu, that we can relate to and hold her hand and be on her journey, how do we hold a hand of this revenge monster? How did a revenge monster come to be? And giving everybody a glimpse at that sort of sliding doors where maybe her life might have been happy just makes her tale so much more tragic.
On Directing Blue Eye Samurai’s Action
[“The Tale of the Ronin and The Bride”], has these striking action sequences that kind of blend the past and present, but that’s true across the board for the entire series. It’s got action out the wazoo in terms of how great it looks. So Jane, I wanted to know, how is it working with Blue Spirit to find the almost live-action elements of the action but remain within this CG animated space?
JANE WU: That’s exactly what we wanted the action to feel or, in fact, the whole Blue Eye Samurai to feel is that camera wise, it felt a little bit more grounded because of the type of story we had to tell. But in the martial arts aspect of it, I have a martial arts background, and I wanted to make sure that it came off with some authenticity to the martial arts aspect as well as the all the arts. So then we hired a stunt director, Sunny Sun, who also did martial arts like me. Well, he’s way better than I am. We were able to share a common language of movements. And there, we built action sequences through Michael, Amber, and I launching Sunny to talk about emotional aspect of it.
So say in, Episode 105 that’s been nominated. We were talking about the Mikio and Mizu fight sequence. I said, “This almost has to be like a dance of lovers as we watch them and it escalates.” So that was the direction he got, and he just went off and then comes back with this beautiful thing. And Blue Spirit, any kind of animation studio, when you do complicated choreographed movements, they need some kind of visual reference. And so we shot it all in live action to help describe to them what some of these movements are.
I also then went to France and taught them a little bit of martial arts, so that they can feel where the weight would be in the body so they would further understand it. Because not every animator is gonna be a martial artist, right? Not every storyboard artist is gonna be a martial artist. So this was a way to really keep the action authentic.
GREEN: Well, they are now. We fixed that.
NOIZUMI: Now they are all a team of animator assassins
Is Blue Eye Samurai an Anime?
I know it’s not necessarily the goal to get within the anime bubble, but working on the anime side of things, I’ve also noticed that it’s been well received by that crowd and flourishing within it. It’s that bridge between animation and the anime world that is blurred with Blue Eye Samurai. So I just wanna know from you all, how do you feel about how anime fans are receiving this show?
GREEN: It’s been amazing. We’re anime fans too, and we knew what we were doing wasn’t anime, but we were hoping the anime fans would find it and embrace it as something as a distant cousin, but familiar. So it’s been wonderful. I mean, anime fans are so passionate. They love it…like the most rabid sports fan doesn’t love their team like anime fans love anime.
NOIZUMI: If they wanna call us anime, they can call us anime. We’re happy to be included.
GREEN: You know, sometimes people misuse the term, and we take it as a matter of compliment. But we worried early on that anime fans would think we were playing in their sandbox. We wanted them to know that we were coming in with reverence.
WU: Right. We wanted to to acknowledge where we were paying homage because, you know, look at my hair. I obviously do anime too. So it’s not to say it’s something we were trying to stray away from. It’s just paying an homage to that genre.
Blue Eye Samurai Season 2 Update
As a final question I do have to ask, with Season 2 now in the works are there any updates you can give about how all of that is coming along?
NOIZUMI: We’re working on it.
GREEN: We’re excited how it’s coming along. It’s going great. We have the best team you could ask for working, applying all their talent and experience into doing the impossible again. And more of the impossible, and celebrating what we got good at and trying some really new crazy things too. Jane, you want to confirm or deny that?
WU: I’m afraid to. As as I’m talking to our our production people going, “No. No. No. Not like this.”
GREEN: Yeah. Jane’s texting people approvals or giving notes in real time. We’re actually playing hooky from it. So when we finish talking to you, we’ll check our email and see the latest designs or early storyboards for our first episode.
Blue Eye Samurai is now streaming on Netflix.
