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Cowboy Bebop Review

Been looking around for some new science fiction to watch but American T.V. has been coming up a bit short lately, save Battlestar Galactica.  I figured I’d check out anime again.  I’ve always liked anime; I like the art style, the mechanical design and the imaginative writing. Sure it’s animated, but often you get some really interesting stories out of it, the kind that tend to be ignored by American producers. That’s what I’m after. But I’ve also got a problem with anime — there aren’t a lot of normal series. By “normal”, I mean not kiddie stuff like Dragon Ball, but also not giant robot stuff (bored of it), space princesses, magical girlfriends, or any of the violent, twisted shit out there like Elfen Lied, Ninja Scroll, Bible Black, etc, etc. I guess I’m looking for some seinen stuff that is less weird and more down to earth.

Well, I just found that anime: Cowboy Bebop.  Years ago I was given a bunch of Cowboy Bebop manga and the other day I got around to reading them.  Pretty damn good, I thought, have they made it into a show?  Yep.  In fact, the show came first.

In the 21st century humanity has built hyperspace gates throughout the solar system to facilitate easy interplanetary travel.  Unfortunately a glitch developed in the system early in its deployment and the gate orbiting the Moon exploded, blowing a big chunk of it off, showering the Earth will trillions of tonnes of rock.  Billions died.

Undaunted by this tremendous loss, humanity fixed the gates and spread out to the planets, colonizing them, terraforming them, building giant orbitals around them, spreading our influence wide.  But our problems came along too, so to curb the growing crime amongst the colonies the government turned to bounty hunters to help bring criminals to justice.

Cowboy Bebop takes place in 2071, long after the Gate Incident.  It follows Jet Black and Spike Spiegel, two professional bounty hunters.  They make an odd pair.  Tall, burly Jet is a former tough-guy cop from Ganymede, and skinny Spike is a former mob enforcer from Mars.  They’re often broke and go from planet to planet and bounty to bounty, doing what they can to stay afloat.  They live in Jet’s spaceship, the Bebop, which he converted from a Ganymede fishing boat.  As the series progresses, they pick up some additional crew members: Faye Valentine, a obnoxious femme fatale card shark, Radical Edward, a strange 14 year-old hacker from Earth, and Ein, an exceptionally gifted data dog they inherit from a botched job.

The world of Bebop is an original one as anime goes, a breath of fresh air, actually.  There’s no magic girls, no dragon balls, no giant robots or tentacles.  It’s a good old fashioned crime drama, at once both Las Vegas and the Wild West, with mobsters and criminals, cheap bourbon and smokes, and endless jazz and blues.  The series is heavily influenced by American music from the 40s, 50s and 60s — it is a prevailing theme throughout.  Gun fights and ship battles are scored to it, the characters listen to it, and there’s always a gin joint blues dive around the corner, just waiting to get shot up.

They’re not saints, our heroes, living on the edge, picking fights with thugs and losers, looking for that big Woolong score.  They all have pasts they’d rather not talk about, if it weren’t for those sordid pasts cropping up occasionally.  The show is a futuristic crime drama, certainly, but it puts a lot of effort into making sure the futuristic bits don’t get in the way of the bar brawls and gun fights.  Indeed, it is a very tech-limited universe as sci-fi goes.  Sure there are spaceships, but only interplanetary ones, and there’s some high tech too, but only if you’ve got the money.  People shoot each other with vintage guns, not laser blasters, and even though we’ve settled Mars and terraformed Venus, humans still live in crappy square tower blocks.  Aliens?  Umm… no.

Comparisons to Blade Runner could be made, James Bond too, but comparisons to Joss Whedon’s iconic Firefly are obvious.  Cowboy Bebop predates Firefly by a number of years and the two productions are similar enough to make you wonder if Whedon saw it before he pitched Firefly.  It is not the same show, of course, Cowboy Bebop is still anime and it suffers from the occasional anime-ism like slow-mo action scenes, funny old-timers and snot-nosed kids.  It tries too hard to be artistic at times, but such pomp is a staple with anime.  Nevertheless, an effort has been put in to tone all that down a notch and ratchet up the crime fighting action which is, in the end, what’s important in a show like this.  It is also not without humour, which is nice, because a lot of American dramas these days are pretty humourless and it starts to wear you down after a while.

Cowboy Bebop is classic seinen anime, I guess, but the producers have gone to great lengths make sure that the violence is not too violent and the sex is not too kinky.  They put style, characters and action first and that’s where the show succeeds.  It’s a science fiction show about bounty hunters — cowboys — on the fringes of society, barely within the law, toiling away to make the ends meet, making the solar system a better place.  The show stays true to this premise, giving you both style and substance while it does.  It’s a cool find in a genre that is often dominated by a lot of derivative, unwatchable crap; it’s interesting and entertaining science fiction worth a look.

3/4

Cowboy Bebop, 1998. 26 episodes OVA, available in DVD box sets, subtitled or dubbed.

Screenshots of the Recently Viewed
I'm back from my trip to Vegas, but I'm still a bit out of it, so here are a few screenshots and quick comments from recently viewed movies. I'll leave the titles off if you want to guess, though this isn't really a screenshot game like I've done in the past. The answers are below the fold in the extended entry...

Screenshot 1:

Screenshot 2:

Screenshot 3:

Again, answers and quick comments in the extended entry...

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 6:37 am and is filed under Cowboy Bebop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.