Blue Eye Samurai is ‘revenge’ for one of Hollywood’s most underappreciated action directors

polygon.com:

Jane Wu understood the journey of a young warrior slashing her way through a male-dominated hierarchy of power. Though Amber Noizumi and Michael Green (Logan, Blade Runner 2049) co-created the new Netflix series Blue Eye Samurai, they found the hard-R animated epic’s soul in Wu, a storyboard artist, director, and martial artist whose unsung role in blockbuster action over the last 20 years made her an obvious choice to oversee the series’ direction. Blue Eye Samurai follows Mizu, a young woman of mixed race in 17th-century Japan, who masquerades as a male samurai to find four white men hiding out in the country — and the one who’s likely her father. Wu’s ascent in the action and animation industries wasn’t as bloody as Blue Eye Samurai, but it was as rigorous.

“It was so eerily relatable how Mizu felt as a woman going through Edo Japan, when women were really seen as decorative things,” Wu tells Polygon. “I absolutely related to the anger she felt. I was able to channel that anger. And it was very cathartic.”

Wu’s frustration with the “bro club” of Hollywood action work comes out in full force in Blue Eye Samurai, which rewires razor-sharp swordplay for the John Wick era. Mizu slices arms, bounces across mountains, and tears herself apart on her quest to find answers. It’s genuinely astonishing, and when Wu’s name pops up in the credits as supervising director, it’s obvious why. Wu’s CV is littered with milestone projects, having storyboarded for the better-than-anyone-would’ve-expected animated series Jackie Chan Adventures and Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot to Game of Thrones and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The filmmaker hit my personal radar when I discovered she choreographed all the best moments in The