To be honest I didn't expect to laugh this often, the humor got punch, very delightful moments. It's an easy 80%, it should be at least 90%. Netflix’s performance suffers both from being too literal and too unhinged.WARNING: The ratings on this show are FAR off!īiased reviews by fans, haters, people who haven't watched it? Who knows.

The original Cowboy Bebop is about that jaggedness of being. The show’s sundry solar system and enigmatic bounty hunter are like fragments of broken glass, revealing in beautiful bits and pieces glimpses of an endlessly deep, endlessly dark sky. Really, the goal for me was to literally humanize him.” The problem, though, is that the world cannot be real and Spike cannot be human. “I was trying to put that out of my head and go into the details of this world and make it more the real world. “I didn't really see this as an anime adaptation,” Cho told WIRED. But why not modulate Spike-amplify the treble, quiet the midrange? Why not shrink Faye’s resentment, remove her teeth? The purists will always have gripes so why not dig out Cowboy Bebop’s pulp and seeds, smash them up, mix in some Tang, and stuff it all back into the peel? Looks like an orange, and smells like one too. In the text, Spike Spiegel is defined by his disinterested swagger Faye Valentine by her howling-wolf malevolence. Picture the overzealous teacher-director encouraging his cast to really ponder the underlying themes, to add a twist to the classic. Cowboy Bebop is performing the anime like a theater class might perform Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Its opening scene, set in an old-school casino, has the charisma of an ’80s sex hotel.

In Cowboy Bebop, the costumes look like costumes. Netflix’s performance suffers both from being too literal and too unhinged.

A large and persuasive contingent of otaku would argue it’s simply not possible to adapt the artform, particularly sci-fi anime, to live-action without it feeling paraphrased. (See: Fullmetal Alchemist, Ghost in the Shell, Death Note). Live-action anime adaptations, generously put, have long failed to engineer the heart of their source anime. There’s no way around it the bar was stratospheric, lifted higher by the infinity of the animation medium. Everyone likes it, because it’s good and because it’s for everyone.Īnnounced in 2017, Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop was always going to be disappointing to fans of the original anime. And because it’s episodic and not very plot-driven, Cowboy Bebop evades the classic anime pitfall of gating affecting moments behind dozens of filler episodes. It’s got the characters of a noir film, Jackie Chan action sequences, music out of a New York jazz club, and the superstructure of a space opera. But at a time in prestige media when audience is certain, the “PORN” sign will always be beheld.Ĭowboy Bebop is held up as anime’s north star, an entirely unobjectionable “favorite” for dabblers and heads alike. What Cowboy Bebop is, down to its hammy cyberpunk signage and the nails of its cheap-looking sets, is a performance. In fact, it probably fails at being a lot of its easiest descriptors: an adaptation, a reimagining, a rendition. At one point, Faye Valentine specifically says the phrase “I’m not gonna carry that weight,” a throwback to the melancholic ending scene of the original series: “You’re gonna carry that weight.”Īs a translation project, though, Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop fails. Actors do their best to voice lines copy-and-pasted from the anime, but with added verve. It re-creates the famous jazz-backed intro. If it didn’t nod to the frothing buildup of 23 years of fandom, the show would appear detached. Definitionally, as a live-action adaptation, it has to-a certain self-consciousness is necessary to translate a cult-classic anime into the third dimension. It’s trite to say Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop breaks the fourth wall.

Cowboy bebop live action cast