‘Blue Eye Samurai’ Creators Amber Noizumi, Michael Green Reveal the Genesis Of This Wholly Original Idea

Amber Noizumi and Michael Green are the wife and husband creative forces behind Netflix’s new animated show Blue Eye Samurai. The series introduces audiences to Mizu, a half-white Japanese swordsmaster, who seeks vengeance against four white men who illegally remain in Japan after the closing of its borders thanks to the Tokugawa shogunate. The series is a visually dazzling, critically acclaimed treat that focuses heavily on building strong characters in addition to action spectacle.

 Here, in an interview with Awards Daily, Noizumi and Green talk about the excitement of creating this original idea. They describe working from a small moment with their own child to a deeper study of history and discovering the perfect medium for the story. They also talks about their deep love for the artistic work that went into creating this world and characters. Finally, they express their deep desire to continue telling more of this fascinating story.

Awards Daily: What was the inspiration for the story behind Blue Eye Samurai?

Amber Noizumi: Well, it started a very long time ago, a whole teenage daughter ago, who to my surprise was born with blue eyes. I was very excited by that and it led to a lot of self-reflection on racial identity, on why I was excited about a child who had blue eyes, who looked more white and less Asian. I started thinking about what it would be like to have blue eyes in Japan (where a lot of women wear colored contacts now), then what it would have been like in the 1600s after the borders were closed and to be mixed race at the time. Knowing that it was illegal to not be fully Japanese. Michael is a big fan of that time period and we started talking about it. He was the one who called our daughter blue eye samurai, and I said that’s a good name.

Michael Green: Yeah, there’s a title. We talked about it on and off for a really long time, thinking this is a great story about a character having to live in those circumstances and also having a high degree of anger that she would be channeling into revenge. We didn’t know what the medium would be, because it felt unfilmable until the lightning strike of the idea of adult animation. Drama in a new format that just hadn’t taken off in the television space at the time, but some places like Netflix were willing to entertain, and we instantly knew how to tell that story.

Awards Daily: That goes into Mizu’s characterization. At first we think she is just about revenge but there are levels to what she is feeling. Ringo brings out her humanity, but we also see glimpses of desire for human connection. There are even deeper levels to what her pain is later in the show. Can you talk about her development as a character?

Amber Noizumi: I don’t believe there’s a single person out there who doesn’t desire human connection. She’s obviously going to have those feelings and if she’s just a revenge monster that is not a good character. So we had to work backwards. What does she want? She wants revenge. What does she need? She needs companionship, some self-acceptance. Ringo is such a great companion to her because he is her antithesis–where she sees darkness, he sees light. He knows about her secret and her flaws and he still adores her and accepts her. So she has to learn to accept him.

Michael Green: Life taught her attachment and connection come with pain and therefore are to be avoided. But life has more to teach her.

Awards Daily: The other major aspect about her is her ability to fight. One thing I really enjoyed about seeing her fighting is we see her skill but we also see her limits. She is not invincible. The battle with the four assassins is a very good example of that. How did you guys go about crafting that balance for her?

Michael Green: We looked at each fight as its own character moment. What are we going to learn about her here? In the first episode we learned she’s phenomenal but she fights students and mostly with wooden swords and only has one real opponent. In the second episode where you mentioned the cliff fight with the four fangs is the first time she’s fighting professional murderers. And there is a moment there where we hope the audience wonders, Is she really that good? That is where we find that out but we also see she is not invincible, she is not Superman. We wanted to live in a world where there were physical consequences: where wounds hurt, wounds healed if they were cut. You didn’t just have to sew your clothes, you had to sew your skin. If you fall feverish it takes time to recoup. In the third episode when she’s dealing with the wounds from the fight with the assassins we really made sure in the animation and her performance that when she moves she is holding her side and grunting and it hurts. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t running headlong into the next danger. Because she is who she is, and always has to burst through the front door of danger. That is what made her a much more relatable Olympian, because even Olympians have limits.

Amber Noizumi: The physical wounds are also where the emotional wounds she collected along the way made her who she is. If we can’t believe she collected physical wounds we are less likely to believe that she has become this “quote-unquote” monster as a result of all this internalized hatred.

Awards Daily: Where did the concept for the animation style come from?

Amber Noizumi: We knew that it needed to look like nothing anyone else had ever seen. We have an appreciation for anime but we knew this wasn’t anime and could never be anime. We wanted a style that broke the barriers of expectations of people who might not normally show up to animation, who might look at this and feel this live action appeal, feel this attachment to characters and come on our journey. even if they normally thought animation was for kids or a niche audience. So this live action animated hybrid took a lot of collaboration with our team.

Michael Green: We got to work with an incredibly gifted set of people who were all very excited about that idea of swinging for the fences. Bringing in a live-action art director Jane Wu and production designer Toby Wilson. This morning I got a flurry of texts from the crew who are very excited to find out we are in the top 10 at Netflix. All of the crew came in with ideas about how to take this thing we saw in our heads and make it what we saw on screen. That brought in things like bringing in a stunt coordinator, which is not something usually done in animation. Kaiser Tin-u came in and did coordination for us like he would for a live action set. We put those stunt shots into our animatics rather than tasking our storyboard artists with having to come up with that level of fight, which probably wouldn’t be possible. We hired a costume designer, Suttirat Anne Larlarb, who I have worked with in live action space. I believe she was double timing, working with us and Star Wars. Someone who lives at that level, being brought in to make sure all the clothing was not only historically accurate but done at the highest levels. Then making sure our animation team was given materials that they could then work with to make certain they look like they were made by an artist’s hand. Even though we were using a 3D computer, it looked like a brush stroke. We wanted it all to feel handcrafted and as bespoke as possible.

Awards Daily: One thing I noticed throughout the show when I was watching it is how women are trapped in this society. Miza pretends to be a man to even walk around. Akemi, despite her wealth, is basically sold off the same way we are seeing unwanted daughters sold to flesh traders. We also spend a lot of time in brothels in general, where these women are given no choice in many cases. It is never in your face but it is a concept that is always present throughout the show. How did you decide on that aspect of the story?

Amber Noizumi: We knew we needed to show what Mizu’s options would have been and to make it compelling why she is going around pretending to be a man. Why wouldn’t she just be a badass lady Samurai walking around? These were the stakes if someone found out she was a woman. It was the way things were so our female characters needed to face the realities of the time. Akemi had to go on her journey of self-discovery to find out the truth. She thought she just needed to find a boy and keep the boy that she wanted. She needed to see what was out there.

Michael Green: Then she found that that’s not really what she wanted or needed. What she wanted was control over her life. Amber’s tea is resting on a book called Selling Women by Amy Stanley, which was a book we went back to a lot. It talks about the role of women during the Edo period, which was one of the many periods in human history where women literally did not own their own bodies. You were born, you belonged to your parents; you are married or sold off, put under contract, that was the condition. Just even finding out that sometimes in the Edo period women couldn’t travel alone without a chaperone. That instantly told us the walls they would be butting against if they had any interest in having agency.

Awards Daily: Speaking of Akemi, I discovered your show because I was looking to see what Brenda Song was doing after Amphibia. Then looking over the whole cast, you have quite an impressive list of actors. Can you talk about how you assembled your team of voice actors?

Amber Noizumi: We started with Maya Erskine as Mizu. We knew we needed somebody who really felt Mizu’s pain and journey as a mixed race woman, and we knew Maya from PEN15 and she does some exploration of her upbringing in that. So we started with her and brought her in early on. Then the rest of the cast came after that and everyone just said yes. They were so excited to be a part of it. We had Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian actors who all felt the limitations in Hollywood for Asian actors. So they were excited to be part of a show that had so much Asian representation in it, where they were not pigeonholed into the role of the funny friend, or the teacher, or the doctor. I think things are changing for Asian actors but slowly, and I think we are part of that.

Michael Green: The only thing I would add to that was the early conversations with our casting directors Margery Simkin and Orly Sitowitz that this was going to be an all Asian cast except for one baddie. They said great, on it! We really got lucky, like Amber said, with our early conversations with them about who we would reach for each role and that ended up being the cast.

Awards Daily: Speaking of your baddie, Fowler is as terrible a human being as you can find but he also has reasons to be very upset by his situation. Where did he come from as a character?

Amber Noizumi: It was how loathsome we can make him before he becomes comical. He is, at times, comical.

Michael Green: Because he enjoys what he is. He knows he is considered a monster for so long.

Amber Noizumi: Even your villains need to have motivation or else they are just cartoon characters.

Michael Green: He is born of some suffering and he then metes it out.

Amber Noizumi: He talks about control. He has this nice little monologue in episode 7 where he says, I control my life. He is seeking control and his grand plans for control may be villainous.

Michael Green: He might be indifferent to other human suffering but he is made by a lot of the same things he has done.

Awards Daily: I have nothing else. Is there anything you can share with us about season two or anything else you want to leave us with?

Amber Noizumi: We always like to say that this is an original story; it doesn’t come from a video game or a comic book. So it is a big leap to make.

Michael Green: We love IP in this family, but it is a bigger risk for Netflix and for us.

Amber Noizumi: Some people are starting to show up, and we hope people will continue to show up and give the show a chance.

Michael Green: It does mean that we come in cold, that audiences need to find us as opposed to coming in. As for season two, we pitched this as an ongoing series from the beginning, one that takes several seasons. We are desperate to keep telling this story so we are hoping that enough people come to join the party so that we get to–as would Netflix. They have been a terrific partner throughout. They just need a lot of viewers. The other ambition is I really want to put out an art book of the work that went into this. The level of artistry and the number of artists is so insane. I just want a big, fat, heavy, coffee-stained book on our table that shows all the work of all the artists we got to play with.