Samurai Champloo (Season 1)

Samurai Champloo (2004) is an anime series you can watch online on iFILM, where Edo-era swordplay collides with hip-hop beats and neither side blinks. It comes from Shinichiro Watanabe, the director behind Cowboy Bebop, who stitches feudal Japan to street culture so cleanly you stop noticing the seam.

Mugen is a vagrant who fights like a break-dancer: reckless, starving, lethal. Jin is a cold, classically trained ronin carrying a dark history he never discusses. The two would happily kill each other. Then a teenager named Fuu pulls both off the gallows and holds them to one promise: help her find a samurai who smells of sunflowers. The three drift across the country, falling into brawls, scams and other people's trouble.

Twenty-six episodes, a soundtrack built by the rap producer Nujabes, animation from studio Manglobe. The anachronisms are the point, not a slip: graffiti on castle walls, duels timed to a beat. The ending lands harder than anything that started this playful had any right to. Stream every episode of Samurai Champloo (2004) online on iFILM.