Hammerscale

I'm really struggling to find enough to watch on Netflix to justify a subscription and I'm letting it lapse but before that happens, I'm watching the whole season of this series, which is an amazing throwback to the days when Netflix produced gems like Bojack Horseman.

I'm usually not into the whole samurai thing, watching stylized and bloody battles. But wow, the animation is just gorgeous. The story is the standard sort of revenge quest, with the twist that the lead character is "mixed breed" and female. The historical setting also makes it different.

The voice cast is packed with stellar talent: George Takei, Masi Oka, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, Randall Park, Kenneth Branagh.

You could quibble about the details. Genetically speaking, a person with a full Japanese mother should have brown eyes, assuming she isn't the carrier of a random blue-eyed gene mutation, which could result in a full Japanese person having blue eyes, which isn't really in the spirit of the thing.

Why would all four of the white men who could be her father still be in xenophobic Japan? How exactly does this slender young woman kick the butts of every guy she meets, even when fighting multiple highly trained attackers? Being half-white does not give her superpowers!

But since it's animation, we can use fairy-tale logic to skirt over all those issues. This is a terrific show, off to a great start.