A bounty hunter, a three-year-old boy and a desert at the end of the Sui dynasty. Blades of the Guardians is a Chinese animated series that most anime fans in the West have never heard of. Here is why we think it belongs next to Samurai Champloo, and the unpopular opinion we are willing to defend: it might be better.
Every few years a series shows up from outside the usual pipeline and quietly rearranges your list. For us, this year, it was Blades of the Guardians, known in Chinese as Biao Ren: fifteen episodes of desert roads, hired swords and some of the best-staged fights in any animated series of the decade.
We have nothing to sell you here. There is no Blades of the Guardians shelf in our shop. We are writing this because we cannot stop talking about it, and because a series this good deserves a far bigger audience in the West than it has.
The man who could not draw
The story starts with its creator, Xu Xianzhe. He had no art training. He practised drawing for four years before his comic, Biao Ren, began serialisation on July 1, 2015.
It found its readers fast. The first printed volume sold more than 100,000 copies in China within a month, and the first ten volumes passed one million copies by 2021. Then something unusual happened for a Chinese comic: it was published in Japan, the home of manga, by Shonen Gahosha.
A self-taught artist, a story about hired blades in a dying dynasty, and a comic good enough to be sold back to the country that invented the form it was borrowing.
What it is about
China, at the end of the Sui dynasty. The government rules by fear and arrest warrants, and the people it wants dead hire Escorts: fighters paid to get them where they are going alive.
Dao Ma is one of them. He is a bounty hunter who travels with his three-year-old son, Xiao Qi, and he takes a job to clear a debt to a man named Mo. It starts in the western desert as one more contract. It does not stay one more contract.
That is all we will tell you. The pleasure of this series is watching a small job turn into the road to Chang'an, one fight and one betrayal at a time.
Why it looks like that
The animated series was announced in August 2020 by Tencent Penguin Pictures and made by Colored Pencil Animation. The first promotional video went out on September 17, 2021. The series itself premiered on Tencent Video on June 1, 2023, and ran for fifteen episodes of about twenty minutes each, one every Thursday, until August 17, 2023.
It was directed by Hiromatsu Shu and Deng Zhiwei, and written by Wen Zhang with Xu Xianzhe himself. Keeping the creator in the writers' room shows. The series moves with the confidence of someone who knows exactly where every character is heading.
What hits first is the drawing. Faces are lined like ink on paper, the desert has weight and heat, and the fights are staged with a clarity most action animation gives up on: you always know where the blade is, who is winning and what it is costing them.
The industry noticed. At the 20th China Animation Golden Dragon Awards in 2023, Blades of the Guardians won the Gold Award for Best Serial Animation, Best Art Direction for Animation, and the "Most Reputation Animation of the Year" award. In 2024 it was nominated for Best Animation and Best Storytelling at the 29th Shanghai Television Festival.
The Samurai Champloo question
We are not comparing these two lightly. Samurai Champloo, Shinichiro Watanabe's 2004 series for Manglobe, is one of the great road anime: 26 episodes of wandering swordsmen in Edo-period Japan, cut to a hip-hop score, with an ending that people still talk about twenty years later.
Blades of the Guardians lives in the same country of the heart. Both are road stories. Both are about people with blades who are paid to protect someone, and who end up protecting something they were never paid for. Both understand that a fight scene is a conversation, and both make you care about the quiet ride between towns as much as the duel at the end of it.
Here is where we go further. Champloo is cool. Blades of the Guardians is heavy. Dao Ma is not a drifter with nothing to lose; he is a father with a three-year-old on his back, and every fight carries that weight. The politics around him are real, the stakes go beyond the next town, and the action is choreographed with a precision that holds up frame by frame.
Unpopular opinion, and we will stand by it: Blades of the Guardians is at least as good as Samurai Champloo, and on its best episodes it is better.
You do not have to agree. You just have to watch the first three episodes and then tell us we are wrong.
It is bigger than you think
If you still think of this as a niche series, consider what happened next. The story was adapted into a live-action film directed by Yuen Woo-ping, the action legend behind the fights of The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Wu Jing plays Dao Ma, with Jet Li, Nicholas Tse and Tony Leung Ka-fai in the cast.
It opened in China on February 17, 2026, during the Chinese New Year holiday, with Well Go USA handling North America and a UK and Ireland release on April 17. It became the highest-grossing wuxia film in Chinese box-office history, and then the highest-grossing wuxia film worldwide, passing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
And the animated series came back. A second season premiered on June 11, 2026, with Tencent Penguin Pictures and Colored Pencil Animation returning.
Where to start
Start with season 1: fifteen short episodes, about five hours in total, which is one long evening or two short ones. The series streams on Tencent Video, and internationally on WeTV where the service is available. The official trailers are on YouTube if you want to see the animation before you commit.
If you love Samurai Champloo, Vinland Saga, Blade of the Immortal or Sword of the Stranger, this is your next series. If you have never watched a Chinese animated series before, this is the one to start with.
Help us make it known
This is the whole ask. If you watch it and it gets you the way it got us, send this article to one friend who loves Samurai Champloo. That is how a series like this finds its audience in the West: one fan at a time.
And then come back and tell us: Champloo or Blades?
Facts in this piece come from the official publication and broadcast record of Biao Ren and Blades of the Guardians and from the published release record of the 2026 film. The comparison with Samurai Champloo is the opinion of the Anime Crush editors.
