Commentary: ‘Blue Eye Samurai’ Changes The Definition Of A Motion Comic

The concept of a motion comic is strange. The whole idea behind the artform is a story told via static images. Adding motion takes away the very thing that makes comics unique. Also, adding voices to motion comics takes away from the magic, too. A comic is literature. It’s meant to be read. So at what point does a motion comic with voiceovers qualify as simple animation? It’s a line that needs to be drawn, yet has no clear answer. It may be possible that a motion comic can mean many different things and come in many different forms. When looking at art from that perspective, it’s possible that Blue Eye Samurai may have created a new kind of compelling motion comic.

The show takes place hundreds of years ago during a time when Japan was closed off and isolated from the world. Because of this, people from the the rest of the globe were considered inferior, and this goes doubly true for Japanese individuals with ancestry from other races. The show’s title refers to a woman (Maya Erskine) passing herself off as a man in order to track down the person who fathered her for revenge. Because he is white, she has blue eyes and has to hide her face or be ostracized. The first episode opens with a sequence of the samurai walking through a town to get to a tavern. The sequence is mostly silent except for music, but it does have a series of captions that set the stage for the events to come.

Using text to communicate this information is not new. But it is often done over a black screen or crawls such as in Star Wars. It’s rare to see text accompanying moving images. It’s hard to think of animation that is this fluid as a comic. But motion comics completely defy this logic to begin with, so it is possible to expand one’s opinion about what a motion comic can be. Reading text like this gives the feel of literature while accompanied by drawn images. Plus, the lack of a voice to communicate the words doubles down on this aspect. There are certainly those who will deny that this opening is a motion comic, but as definitions continue to shift and storytellers experiment with different formats it might be possible to rethink what a motion comic is.

Blue Eye Samurai is now streaming on Netflix.