Samurai Jack

Samurai Jack is some what of an oddity in my opinion. Having really only gained popularity once it was no longer a continuing series. Animated by Tartakovsky, his strong artwork style comes out here in the best of ways. This is the same style you can see in his other cartoons such as Dexter's Lab, Powerpuff Girls, and Clone Wars Mini Series.

As you are reminded in each introduction, Samurai Jack was once a citizen of feudal Japan who's land had been ravaged by an evil shape shifter Aku. Aku battles the samurai who wields a magical sword, the only object that can harm him, and is nearly defeated. At the last second however, Aku rips a portal open in time, transporting Samurai Jack thousands of years into the future where Aku has enslaved not only this world, but countless others. Samurai Jack's only goal from this point on, is to find a portal back to his own time, and defeat Aku in order to save is land and the future.

The reason I say that Samurai Jack is an oddity isn't also because of it's late popularity as it appeals to a wide age pool, but in how it tells stories. There are many, many episodes where dialogue does not come into the picture until ten minutes in the episode. Several episodes lack dialogue all together. The plot is slowly pushed along, and some might find the lack of actual pacing (*spoiler!*as well as the lack of any conclusion thus far) to be very frustrating. Instead, each episode works to either reveal back story for Jack, flush out the future universe, or serve as an artistic battle between Jack and a villain, or bounty hunters for the entire time in order to show how much of a boss Jack is. Witty comments, and some great humor is somehow managed seamlessly throughout the series. Often times without dialogue as well.

The style is very much Tartakovsky's own, and moves between amazingly simple, to rather abstract and beautiful. Backdrops are of constant intrigue, and battles always consist of some robots so that decapitations could be shown to a younger audience, and is still awesome in my opinion. Samurai Jack is almost a batman character, except for he is not quite used to the time he is in, and takes the samurai code seriously. Although most episodes are in of themselves one story, these all layer on top of each other amazingly well and create rich universe with several very dynamic and memorable characters. At some points I felt as if they were just trying to find more situations in which they could put Jack into and have him be awesome. This is a great series

So for summary. Samurai Jack is about a samurai who fights hordes of robots, often on dinosaur robot steads with laser guns, alien bounty hunters, and teams up with a Scotsman with a grenade launcher peg-leg to keep on his journey while gaining aide and ire from numerous figures of world mythologies (and zombies). Also space, awesome animation, one of the first anime's to incorporate actual martial arts moves into a story (Wu Shu).
It's good. Watch it.
Oh, and he goes to a rave. That was awesome.