Animated assassin comedy Scissor Seven turns its hero’s refusal to kill into a running gag

He Xiaofeng built Scissor Seven around a joke that should not work: a killer who cannot kill, a barber who cannot cut hair, and a memory that refuses to come back. The Chinese animated series premiered on April 25, 2018, and ran five seasons and 50 episodes across iQiyi, Youku, Bilibili and Tencent Video, ending on November 20, 2024. It is a comedy about amnesia that keeps turning into an action show about power, and it earns that turn.

The premise is simple. Seven runs a barber shop on Chicken Island as a front for his ambition to become a professional killer. He is broke, clumsy, and unaware that he is already an infamous assassin who lost his memory. He is ranked 17369th on the assassin list, a number that tells you everything about how the show treats its own hero.

Chicken Island and the barber who cannot remember

What makes Seven work as a protagonist is that the show never lets him be cool for long. He wields a pair of scissors as a weapon and manipulates them, but the gag is that his real ability far outstrips his rank. He wears a white hoodie with the initial for Seven on it, the kind of detail that sounds like branding until you realize it is the only name he has.

He Xiaofeng voices Seven in Mandarin and Cantonese, and he also created the series. That double role matters. The show has a creator’s fingerprints on its central character, and Seven’s comic timing feels written and performed by the same sensibility. Ronny Chieng voiced Seven in English for seasons 1 through 4, with Daniel J. Kim taking over for season 5.

The supporting cast fills out the island. Jiang Guangtao voices Ji Dabao, the character who takes Seven in after the memory loss. Zhao Han voices a small robot from the Stan Kingdom. These are not decorative roles. Ji Dabao in particular gives the show its grounding, a caretaker who treats a dangerous man like a project.

Plum Blossom Thirteen and the assassin who will not finish the job

The best thread in Scissor Seven belongs to Thirteen, voiced by Duan Yixuan in Mandarin and Jennie Kwan in English. She is the unnamed youngest daughter of the Plum Blossom Master, a man so fixated on having a son that he cycled through wives and thirteen daughters before finally getting one boy. Her mother divorced him over it, then was murdered.

Thirteen trains under an assassin later revealed as Qing Feng and vows to defeat all men, starting with her father. She is assigned to kill Seven and recover a legendary sword. She keeps failing, and the show keeps making those failures funny, including a kiss that derails an attempt. Seven is the only person who does not care about her past. He treats her like a normal girl, and that changes her.

It is a romance built out of a hit contract, and the show knows it. The odd romantic relationship between Seven and Thirteen gives the comedy a spine. Every gag about her failed assassinations carries the weight of what she actually wants.

Five seasons, one long fight for memory

The series moved through a steady release schedule, with gaps that grew as the production matured.

The show began as a manhua. He Xiaofeng serialized Scissor Seven, also known as Killer Seven, on Tencent Dongman between 2016 and 2017 before the donghua adaptation arrived. A prequel manhua, Scissor Seven: Black and White Twin Dragons, has run on Tencent Dongman and Manga Bilibili since 2021.

Outside China, Scissor Seven debuted worldwide on Netflix in 2020. That release did real work. It put a Chinese animated series in front of an audience that otherwise would have missed it, and the show’s blend of slapstick and faction warfare traveled better than its premise suggested.

The Annecy nomination and what it signaled

The series received a nomination in the TV Film category at the 2018 Annecy International Animated Film Festival. That is the kind of recognition that matters less for what it awards than for what it confirms: the animation itself holds up against international competition.

Scissor Seven earns that. The action sequences are staged with real clarity, and the comedy depends on timing rather than noise. The show understands that a fight scene is funnier when the fighter is out of his depth, and it understands that a serious fight lands harder when the audience has been laughing.

The genres listed for the series are animation, comedy, action and adventure, and sci-fi and fantasy. That is a lot of registers to hold at once. The show manages it because the factions and the power struggle give the comedy somewhere to go. Seven stumbling into a war between feuding factions is not a detour from the premise. It is the premise paying off.

Where the show stumbles

Five seasons is a long time to sustain a memory-loss plot, and Scissor Seven does not always solve the problem. The central question of who Seven was before Chicken Island can only be deferred so many times before the deferral itself becomes the story. The show leans on that tension, and mostly it works, but the middle seasons feel the strain.

The larger issue is the cast balance. Thirteen’s arc is the most complete and the most emotionally direct. When the show shifts focus to the broader power struggle, it loses some of that intimacy. The factions matter, but they matter because Seven and Thirteen are caught in them, not on their own.

None of this breaks the series. It just means Scissor Seven is at its best when it stays small: a barber shop, a pair of scissors, and two people who should be enemies.

What the audience score actually measures

The TMDB audience score for Scissor Seven sits at 8.6 out of 10 across 788 votes. That number is worth reading carefully. An audience score measures how people who finished the show felt about it, not how many people started it, and 788 votes is a small sample for a series with five seasons and a Netflix release. It is a signal from the committed, not a verdict from the crowd.

What it does confirm is that the people who stuck with Scissor Seven to the end were not disappointed. That tracks with the show’s shape. The first season is a comedy with a mystery underneath it. By the time the factions and the shadow assassins take over, the audience has already bought into Seven and Thirteen, and the payoff is emotional rather than tactical.

Scissor Seven

Scissor Seven is one of the more confident animated series to come out of China in the past decade, and it holds its tone across 50 episodes without collapsing into either pure slapstick or self-serious action. He Xiaofeng’s creation works because it never forgets that the joke and the stakes are the same thing.

The uneven middle seasons and the stretched amnesia hook keep it from being flawless. But Thirteen is the character who justifies the whole enterprise, and the show knows it. A prequel manhua and an announced film sequel suggest the story is not finished. If the film follows through on what season four set up, the best of Scissor Seven may still be ahead of it.

Scissor Seven: 8.6 out of 10.

Chinese animation · donghua · He Xiaofeng · Netflix anime · Plum Blossom Thirteen · Scissor Seven