COWBOY BEBOP

Space: the Final Frontier.  An endless sandbox beyond the stratosphere that man has dreamed to conquer for millennia.  That is where man’s future is.  And while we’re building our future, we may as well listen to some hot jazz music that sounds like it predates 1950, right?  That’s exactly the kind of future Cowboy Bebop chooses to live in, and you can like it or get the hell out of the airlock!  Because in space, no one can hear you whine.

Cowboy Bebop is a 26 episode series set in the year 2071, but you’re immediately reminded of the late 1990s when the internet is referred to as “the net.”  The Earth has been destroyed by fragments of the moon which was blown up when a hyperdrive-type device went through and shattered it.  While some of the Earth’s population remained, most of humanity fled for other destinations in the solar system.  Mars has become the hub for civilization, while other planets, moons, and asteroids have been terraformed as well.

The story revolves around three bounty hunters, or “cowboys” in the parlance of the series, a tech-savvy ten-year-old, and their dog.  Spike Spiegel is the most prominent of the ensemble cast.  He doesn’t talk much about himself and dives headfirst into every situation and manages to come out unscathed almost every time.  Jet Black is an ex-cop with a robotic arm.  He’s the captain of the ship, called the “Bebop.”  Ed is the ten-year-old computer genius and a girl, despite what the name implies.  Faye Valentine is a sexist anime trope whose design was necessary to appease the male fan base.  Throughout the series, more information about the characters and their past is learned.  Cowboy Bebop’s primary theme deals with the characters and their past catching up with them.

The series definitely has more style over substance, and that’s a good thing.  That style derives mostly from the music which stands as a character in it of itself.  Much of it can be classified as some form of jazz, but other music is featured in the series.  Many of the episodes revolve around a specific genre of music, and it sets the tone for the entire episode.  And the theme song—my God, the theme song—stands as one of the greatest theme songs in the history of animation.  Yoko Kanno is famous for her scores, but this may be her magnum opus.  You get the feeling that the people involved really enjoyed working on the show.

The tone of the show is scattershot across the spectrum and blends and melds genres in a way that would give the Coen Brothers a run for their money.  One episode can be a blaxploitation (Yes, there’s finally an anime that features black characters that aren’t all in blackface), and the next it can be a horror story. And while one would expect science fiction to be the driving force behind the show, it’s merely a setup.  Cowboy Bebop pays homage to Westerns and Film Noir more than to any other genre.  That’s why smoking always looks so cool!

Best not to follow in Pokemon's footsteps.

Bebop's distinct tone fades a bit as the series nears its end.  The show begins to take itself too seriously and tries to become something bigger than itself at times.  That doesn’t detract from the show as a whole, but it gets a little tiresome to sit through the philosophical author filibuster that begins to make itself prominent in the episode “Pierrot Le Fou.”  I don’t like being talked down to by a TV show.  Either give me the chance to understand what you’re trying to say on my own, or let it slip over my head.  There’s no need to stop and explain the plot like a Bond villain.  You need to give the audience some credit.  It’s pretentious, and it’s just bad writing.

The animation is what you would expect from an anime.  Drawings do move, but are stiff and characters typically talk out of the side of their mouths like some kind of flounder mutant.  There is enough shifting between scenes during fight sequences that the action is made palpable.  The hand-painted backgrounds are spectacularly detailed, but cannot make up for the low cel count of the show.  I’m not expecting Disney quality animation, but is it too much to ask for anime to move out of the Hanna-Barbara era of animation?  On top of all that, the character design is incredibly generic.

But I don’t want to be too down on Cowboy Bebop. Structurally, many of the episodes, or “sessions” as they’re called, stand on their own within the series.  Unlike most anime, there isn’t a single driving story arc.  There’s no single goal all the characters are working towards.  It seems much more like a show that was developed for a Western audience in that sense.

Instead, the series is divided into “half-arcs.”  As stated above, Cowboy Bebop follows each character and examines how they each deal with their troubled past.  But the show’s overall story is very episodic unrelated events occur in between, much like The Iliad or The Odyssey.  The show can actually be watched out of order, and you would understand 95 percent of what is going on.  And the best part?  It works.

You'll know whether or not you like this series by the end of the first episode; it serves as a microcosm for what’s ahead in the entire series.  Elijah Lee recommended Cowboy Bebop to me, and I was hesitant because I’m not an anime fan.  After watching the first episode, I didn’t just like this show; it became one of my favorites.  There’s a reason it’s considered the Citizen Kane of anime.

- Fallettus