“The Bounty Hunters” is the 17th episode of the second season of Clone Wars and is a blatant homage to Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”.  And I’ll warn you ahead of time that if you haven’t seen Seven Samurai, this review is probably not going to mean much to you.  I loved all the careful references and analogies in this episode so much, that’s most of what I want to talk about.

Checking out the status of a medical station that was supposed to be in orbit around Felucia, Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Ahsoka are ambushed by Separatist Droid starfighters who we can also presume destroyed the medical station.  They crash land planetside near a small farming village under the protection of four Bounty Hunters.  You see, Hondo Ohnaka is in town and he wants to steal their valuable crops.

Soon, the Bounty Hunters and 2 and 1/2 Jedi (Ahsoka being the one too young to count, an homage to Katsushiro) form a band of seven to train the farmers and protect them from their would be attackers.

One of the coolest in the story is Embo, pictured above and voiced by Supervising Director Dave Filoni himself.  His character is very much the Kyuzo sort of master swordsman character from the Kurosawa film.  Other characters seem to be analogs of the samurai in the film as well.  It seems to me that Anakin and Obi-wan are the Kambei and Shichiroji of the group, the female bounty hunter reminds a bit of Kikuchiyo, and the pint size bounty hunter in the armour was the comic relief, much like Heihachi.  I don’t recall the last bounty hunter doing a whole heckuva lot, but we may as well round it out and assume he was analogous to Gorobei.  And there was a farmer very much like Manzo, who wanted to flee from his duty to his village.

When Ohnaka attacks, his tank serves much the same purpose as the three rifles carried by the bandits in “Seven Samurai”.

The only thing disapointing about this adaptation is that there was no sense of loss, like at the end of Kurosawa’s picture.  We didn’t lose any Bounty Hunters (and we obviously didn’t lose any Jedi) and Hondo Ohnaka escaped to fight another day.  I’m okay with that, since I really like Ohnaka, but there was little at stake here.  Aside from all of that, the adaptation of one of the greatest three-plus hour films of all time into a 22 minute episode was superb.  True, they dropped the Jedi half-way into the story, but that was a very smart move.

In fact, I think this ties Pixar’s A Bug’s Life as the greatest animated remake of “Seven Samurai” ever.

I’d also like to take a second to say, “Yay!  Ahsoka’s back!”  I’ve really, really missed her and am glad to see her back on the show.  She’s had some of the best episodes this season, and I can’t imagine that will stop any time soon.

The backgrounds, animation, and action sequences in this episode were a cut above.  There was a kinetic energy to the opening and closing fights that were quite thrilling and better than normal.  And it’s nice to see Felucia getting more time on screen.  The animators have obviously spent a lot of time building that world for the show, and their care for it shows in their work.

If you don’t own a copy of Seven Samurai, now is the time to get it.

To catch up on Season 1, you can order The Clone Wars: The Complete Season One at Amazon by clicking the link.

For other Clone Wars news and reviews of previous episodes, click this link.