The films are based on Musashi, a novel by Eiji Yoshikawa about the famous duelist and author of The Book of Five Rings.
The three films are: Together, they are a trilogy following the character growth of Musashi from brash—yet strong—young soldier to thoughtful and introspective samurai.
The choreography for the films was by Yoshio Sugino of the Tenshin Shōden Katori Shintō-ryū.
Samurai I won the 1955 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
In a review almost 60 years after the release of the trilogy, the late academic and film critic Stephen Prince noted "the absence of gore" in the films: "Severed limbs and spurting arteries hadn't yet arrived as a movie convention, and the fights in The Samurai Trilogy are relatively chaste, not showing the carnage that such duels would have actually resulted in".