Imagine you are a young Japanese metropolitan police officer eking out a small life with your long distance girlfriend while working at a normal police station at a street corner. One night of your routine, you run across a seemingly homeless and definitely naked kid who stands up and tells you he’s a superhero. Then, because you ruined his outfit he wasn’t wearing, you take him back home where you watch old Tokusatsu shows and eat Super Sentai curry while he tells you that, while he is a fashion model by day, he strives for one thing: To be a hero like the ones he idolized as a kid. There are no mutants. There are no kaiju, there are no ghosts from the future. He cannot fight the big evils of the world, but there are many small evils within his reach. He will strive for justice even if it’s only stamping out rowdy kids, jaywalkers, and people who smoke in non-smoking areas.
You find yourself in the world of Samurai Flamenco, a new show running in the Noitamina block taking a lot of cues from tokusatsu shows, and it’s great. Noitamina is known for doing experimental shows with fresh ideas, and this is a great start to one. We’re given a dryer, normal character to sympathize with in Goto Hidenori, voice by Tomokazu Sugita, as he meets with this kid, Hazama Matsuyoshi, voiced by Toshiki Masuda, who never quite left his childhood superhero dreams behind. Even after becoming a model with an apartment that could fit what looks like two of Goto’s apartments inside of it, he got a designer friend of his to make a superhero suit for him so he could keep the dream alive. He takes tokusatsu poses while whipping around remotes to turn on the show he’s going to watch. He eats Sentai curry because you have to live the whole life. He picks a fight with a jaywalking businessman because you can’t stand for any evil, no matter how small. He’s dumb as hell! But you can’t help but sympathize with his desires. You, like Goto, look at him and want him to take his desires of justice as far as they’ll go. The show does an excellent job making you feel that way.
And the dialogue is just great. The little touches to make the characters talk like people do. “Stop talking about curry! Damn it, now you’ve made me crave curry.” Conversations about whether Kamen Rider’s mask counts as a helmet because if it doesn’t, he’s a superhero that breaks the law. Tiny little touches that go a mile in fleshing out the characters and making them more human before one of them goes out in a jumpsuit to tell kids to stop being a nuisance. It’s really well done. Also, Sugita is voicing a character named Hidenori again, and that made me giggle. It’s good to see the goofy sensibilities of that carried over to this show even if that is a coincidence.
This show is off to a great start. It’s streaming on Crunchyroll, and I’ve heard that Hulu will be getting it. Please do give it a shot, and remember: “Hero will never give up, never hide, never be defeated, never accept evil.”
You can check out the rest of the teaser pictures over on Yaraon.
This episode is going to have moments where it gets kinda cool.
And this episode’s going to have moments where it gets kinda awkward.
One Pixel Jump 