Samurai Champloo. When I first saw this series on Adult Swim as a child, I was just intrigued by the title. What the hell is a Champloo? Regardless, that was when I first found my love for the show’s soundtrack. Firstly, this whole anime was so impactful because of the soundtrack. When it came to the intro or the battles throughout the show, it just made sense.

For the people who haven’t watched this show, please do yourself a favor and watch it now. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

Now, spoilers below.

The story starts off as a young girl looking for her father, when she encounters two wanderers of contrasting personalities. The samurai who smells of sunflowers rings throughout the show’s 26 episodes. What makes Samurai Champloo so different from the rest of the anime is its ending.

On its 26th episode, Evanescent Encounter, our heroes are faced with their final struggles, with Fuu facing her father, Jin facing an enemy of his past, and with Mugen tying ends with his own. It turns out that Fuu’s father she has been longing to search for was sick and eventually killed by the hand of the Shogunate. What makes this part of the ending so impactful was that throughout the show, Fuu’s dreams and visions of this ‘samurai who smells of sunflowers’ was just a withering husk of his former self. This led me to one of the anime’s several themes of facing with reality.

From the beginning of the show, Fuu has only dreams and recollections of her father. This flashback goes on throughout the show, portraying her father as some sort of immortal and mysterious figure. The buildup throughout the show makes the viewer even more intrigued on who this man is and what makes him than being more than just special. This buildup and climax is relieved at the ending of the show, revealing that throughout the cast’s whole journey that he was just living in a hut, dying from his sickness. Gone is this heroic image of a mysterious father, faced with the reality of life and its great equalizer–death.

Now, what binds us in our own life, similar to Fuu’s, is nostalgia. As a child, we may have had our own aspirations and dreams of solving our own mysteries, and as adults, facing them and accepting them was the bigger obstacle. As a child you may remember that big house you lived in, almost having an aura of magic around it. When you face it as an adult, it is just a plain old house. Connecting back to Fuu’s dilemma, this man, this image, she has seen as a child just further drove her nostalgia and piquing that sense of curiosity and fulfillment. Once she sees her father, this facade of a man is corrupted by reality itself. No longer is this the father from her dreams, but the father of her reality. Similar to our own nostalgic aspirations, the theme is that

Nothing is how it is anymore.

Gone are the days where we think and see from a child’s perspective. The facade of reality is hidden by our own mind desiring only positivity. This imagination of ours lulls us in a false reality that is just simply…our imagination.

Now at the very end of the show, with all the problems ‘solved’, our band of heroes are faced at a crossroads. This whole journey of theirs is over. All their mysteries and questions are dealt with, and they all have faced what we struggle to deal with in our own lives. Reality.

The beauty of the ending lies in the fact that it doesn’t succumb to typical show endings, where the characters have a symbolic death of some sort. It simply ends where each character moves on in their own life, once reality has hit them. The best part of the ending is where all the characters have some sort of grin, as if to portray their reaction to satisfying their adversities. That whole journey of theirs is not just over, but has just started. Another beautiful thing about this ending, is that it leaves you speculating on what these characters will do now, especially since their adventure is ‘over’. What I got from the show was the sense of facing your past and accepting reality for how it is, and the most important part, moving on.

Whenever I have an issue or whatever struggles I am facing in life, I always rewatch this anime as I keep forgetting the lessons this show is trying to tell me. For this reason, Samurai Champloo remains to be my favorite show of all time.

Now with everyone facing their own problems, just rethink, take a breath, and accept it and move on.

Cheers folks, I wish you all a happy new year and what not. This is one of the first articles I have written and has been on my mind for quite a bit. Credit to all the Samurai Champloo pictures I linked on her, now of course, I do not own them in any way and I am only using it solely for review purposes.