RIP Cowboy Bebop #Netflix
I mean honestly, could we have expected more than this?
I suppose I need to stay fair in thinking about the just released, just canceled live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop. But more than the ever consistent dilemmas that come with translating japanese animation into live action for western audiences, there seemed to be something immediately missing as the clearly reverent nods to classic iconography and episodes unspooled before my eyes a few weeks ago. I needed the extra time to collate thoughts about what didn’t work, and the main element that keeps coming back to mind is..heart. To put it mildly, for all the clever casting, the occasional dead on visualization of famous moments, the ever present sound of Seatbelts wafting through scenes, the biggest problem for me was that the final product seems far more interested in the language of “cool” rather than of tactile emotionality. One of the most vital underpinnings of the anime is the use of blues, jazz, and other genres to often convey feelings that our spacefaring characters find themselves unable to verbalize. This sense of sad sack persists in the often run down, rust covered space colony system of the show. Illustrative of the romance of outer space becoming nothing more than a junked out, overpopulated, spiritually worn out shell of itself. The blue collar world of ALIEN is taken to its logical conclusion as we see that capitalism has indeed turned space into just another network of dusty freeways, casinos, and shopping malls.
And while the show tries its damndest to present the world as it was in the original, there is a clear lack of real consideration for the way the world looks and how it affects the people. For a project whose episodes run two to three times as long as a 22 minute animated one, it really feels like so much emptiness is exposed. Considering this specifically, it’s a losing strategy to not only forget that this is a consistent theme throughout Bebop ‘98, but that a huge amount of why our characters behave the way they do is in response to it.
It truly is a gaping hole in the writing. For all the Easter Eggs, and various nods they provided it was missing this ever present sadness that drives everyone throughout. And this is from someone who doesn’t mind making someone else’s mythology yours. It didn't have to follow the story. But Bebop is a particular brand of melancholy that makes the characters sing. And without it, it’s an endurance test to be around anyone. This is especially true of Faye Valentine, who for me sports one of the more moving arcs of the original. By swapping out a woman who knew endless misfortune only to create an often effective facade of coolness into an abrasive, loud girlboss type feels like a profound misreading. Or how about when we give Jet a daughter in hopes of instantly delivering us his future role as the ship’s “dad” figure? Or maybe let’s needlessly keep having Spike and Jet killing willy-nilly for no reason because of comedy, or because “COOL”? It’s hard to grasp what was going on at the screenwriting level as a lot of it plays like producers saw little value in patiently granting viewers subtle character moments that could culminate in the finale. There’s a definite drive in the live action to front load everything, and that’s the problem. Like the jazz cliche, a huge amount of what makes the late, great Nobumoto Keiko’s character writing so impactful, is its deliberate patience in what it doesn’t say, even as the anime mostly uses an episodic format.
So much stealth character building in those scripts, often told in behaviors and mannerisms.
Good casting can't overcome shallow writing. But the fact that no one at the top tried to keep it more on-board with making the characters relatable flawed saddens me most. What we get is a lot of surface level posture.
It could also be that with anime, everything is about efficiency. These LA episodes go on way longer than they should, making it harder to work through. And yeah, Vicious and Julia do not need backstories. They only represent inability to let go, which is powerful because they are such elusive ideas. We can't know. That to me was a big part of the original, that Spike was eternally incapable of escaping his past. It's a shadow. Not something we are privy to. There's a deliberate line between the Spike we know, and the Spike that is supposedly dead. We're not meant to know dead Spike. Another shadow. Heck, Vicious is merely an illustration of Spike’s past as a hollowed out angel of death. And while I can see the writer’s temptation to humanize the character, but a huge part of what makes such a deliberate abstraction of Vicious is that in what little he says in the anime, it’s clear that he is the end result for Spike should he abandon all forms of attachment, Julia included. The tragedy of the original series lies in how we absorb the often unspoken lingering pain of our scrappy leads, only to see that there was a glimpse of connection in this often cruel galaxy. And while it may not have turned out all roses in the end, the central lesson being conveyed is that those seemingly insignificant encounters we make are opportunities to turn the past into something akin to redemption.
What we do get a glimpse of throughout Watanabe’s anime, is another possible life. For everyone. A possibility that is fleeting and just out of reach for our central leads. And that's really hard to write when “cool” is the goal. It just seemed like they needed a real top down rewrite from a character perspective. And that begins by regarding everyone in that universe as tattered by a persistent capitalistic cruelty at the heart of everything and everyone in the series. Because the Netflix series seemingly forgot this, what we got was hard to get invested in. Hard for me anyway..
I really wanted to feel this take on the journey. It simply wasn't there for me on that much needed human level. Something the original does almost supernaturally well.
The only plus for me here was more Kanno/Seatbelts.
But that’s always a win.
