Show Guide

Samurai Jack

2001 Adult Swim 30 min Action, Adventure
9our take /10
8IMDb /10
Samurai Jack is a brave and honorable samurai from the distant past trapped in a nightmarish future. He is terrorized by his sworn enemy, the evil shapeshifting demon Aku. He quests for a way back to the past so that he may stop Aku once and for all.

Our Review

Genndy Tartakovsky’s silent-movie masterpiece in cartoon form: a samurai flung to a dystopian future by the shape-shifting demon Aku, fighting across gorgeous, wordless landscapes to find a way back to the past and undo the future that is Aku. The original four seasons (2001-2004) were a formal revelation — action staging influenced by Kurosawa and Leone, episodes that went ten minutes without dialogue, art direction that changed style per episode: noir, ukiyo-e woodblock, Frank Miller.

Then Adult Swim brought it back in 2017 for a final season that did the impossible: aged Jack fifty years into a haunted, PTSD-wracked survivor, gave the show actual blood, actual death, and an actual love story, and closed the loop with a finale that recontextualizes the entire saga into a meditation on purpose and loss. The last five minutes are the most moving thing Tartakovsky has ever made.

Verdict: Watch it. The closest American animation has come to pure cinema.

Seasons

Samurai Jack — Season 1

13 episodes
Season 1 of Samurai Jack premiered 2001-08-10 and ran 13 episodes through 2001-12-03.

Samurai Jack — Season 2

13 episodes
Season 2 of Samurai Jack premiered 2002-03-01 and ran 13 episodes through 2002-10-11.

Samurai Jack — Season 3

13 episodes
Season 3 of Samurai Jack premiered 2002-10-18 and ran 13 episodes through 2003-08-26.

Samurai Jack — Season 4

13 episodes
Season 4 of Samurai Jack premiered 2003-06-14 and ran 13 episodes through 2004-09-25.

Samurai Jack — Season 5

10 episodes
Season 5 of Samurai Jack premiered 2017-03-11 and ran 10 episodes through 2017-05-20.