developed by Christopher Yost
I really don't consider myself a big anime fan in general. There are a lot of anime films that I enjoy, like majority of the catalog of Studio Ghibli, or the relatively recent hit Your Name, but I like to consider myself, at best a casual fan of anime and not a purist by any stretch. That said, I do count myself among the many who despise Hollywood's attempts to produce live-action adaptations of anime, because of how they very consistenly get it wrong.
That said, I was willing to give Netflix's live-action reimagining of the popular 90s anime series Cowboy Bebop a whirl, because at the very least, the still photos from the adaptation looked like they reasonably captured the look of the anime, with which I had only a passing familiarity. Also, I had enjoyed Netflix's series Altered Carbon, and this looked like it had the same sci-fi sensibility.
Being out of town last month for nearly a week with a lot of down time, I binge-watched all 26 episodes of the original anime series, and while I still would not consider myself any kind of "expert" on the series just because I'd seen it, I was at least all caught up on what the series was all about. I had previously only seen snippets of the 2001 special, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie on cable television. Watching the anime also enabled me to appreciate just how special this series was and still is, and why it was a prime target for adaptation.
It's essentially the adventures of a crew of bounty hunters (called "cowboys" in the show, hence the first half of the title) who fly around space in a ship called the Bebop (hence the second half). The crew consists of the lean, mean fighting machine (and ex-hit-man) Spike Spiegel, ex-cop Jet Black, amnesiac Faye Valentine, hacker genius Radical Ed and their British Corgi Ein. Each episode has the crew chasing down a new bounty or fighting off people who want to kill them. There are also several continuing threads that run throughout most of the episodes, such as Spike dealing with his past, specifically his membership in a criminal syndicate called, simply enough, the Syndicate, as well as Faye's search for her own past, which she cannot remember at all, but for the most part the episodes have self-contained stories laced with generous helpings of humor, action and heart, all of which is presented in some of the slickest animation I've ever seen in serialized anime (as opposed to feature film animation).
So good is the anime, in fact, that for all of its efforts to replicate its highly-stylized look, the live-action series just ends up looking, for the most part, clumsy.
I quite liked seeing John Cho as Spike Spiegel and Mustafa Shakir as Jet Black. Not only are they good actors, but they have quite effective chemistry. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the other actors in major roles in the cast, from Daniella Pineda as Faye, to Alex Haskell as Vicious, Spike's old colleague in the Syndicate and now his deadly nemesis, to Elena Satine as Julia, Spike's ex and now Vicious' wife. It's as if they're trying to act like cartoon characters rather than somehow bring these characters to life in their own way. It's a sterling example of how anime's stylized approach to storytelling just doesn't translate very well. The fact that some of the episodes attempt to do virtually shot-for-shot retellings of the original animated episodes rather than using them as guides comes off as downright embarrassing. Every now and then it works, but rarely.
In true Netflix fashion, they left this series on a cliffhanger rather than wrap up Season 1 with a satisfactory ending in the obvious hope of spawning a Season 2, only to cancel the whole thing when the target audience rejected this new iteration of the show. Netflix hasn't bothered to waste any more time on this show, niether should any of you.
5/10
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