Cowboy Bebop review: Netflix reduces a classic anime to a wacky cartoon

Original Cowboy BebopThe 2021 anime were like an acclaimed group with many defining hits and a near-perfect career. Cowboy BebopThis is a cover band for ska-funk that plays through the songs. The players involved with Netflix’s new blockbuster series throw themselves into the material, and viewers might even feel a rush of joy in recognizing an old favorite reinterpreted with colorful enthusiasm. But that initial charm can’t disguise the fact that the singer only seems to know about half the lyrics, and the guitarist can’t carry a tune.

This is the core principle of Cowboy Bebop remains more or less the same: Bounty hunters Spike Spiegel (John Cho), Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), and Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) zip around the solar system in a retrofitted fishing trawler dubbed “the Bebop,” hunting down criminals to earn a living. While assassins or mafiosos are often on their tails, each of the Bebop’s crewmates also outrun, or try to reconcile with, the trauma of their respective pasts. They are living fast, whether in Mars’ seedy underbelly or the sun-baked New Tijuana bubble.

The live-action production of this show is all about the costumes, makeup, and set design. Cowboy BebopTo go further, she pays close attention to all the details in the original anime. New arcs are created by altering the characters’ backstories. They offer new perspectives and depths not found in the original. The show expands the character of Julia (Elene Satine), Spike’s former flame, in ways the original Cowboy BebopShe never had, which gave her an understanding of the past, present, autonomy, motivation, and a way to be loved by Spike or Vicious. Alex Hassell makes Vicious an absurd antagonist. However, Vicious has been rendered more conniving, impetuously temperamental, and sociopathic than the full-blown sociopath. There’s also greater attention to the motivations behind his conquest for power other than power simply for the sake of power itself. It was a decision that Yoko Kanno, composer of this series, would return to play the music for the new series. This shows how important her music is to the character of anime.

But the stark disparity between the exaggerated tone of the Netflix series and that of the original 26-episode anime (and interquel feature film) feels like a decision by showrunner showrunner André Nemec to interpret the idea of what a cartoon would feel like in live-action rather than create a more straightforward version of Cowboy Bebop. The decision stumbles hardest in the series’ attempts at humor, be it cringe-inducing puns about Jet’s Black manhood or a character named “The Eunuch” boasting about the power that comes from castrating and devouring your enemies’ testicles.

Geoffrey Short/Netflix.

Original Cowboy Bebop anime, conceived and produced by screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, animation director Toshiro Kawamoto, key animator Yutaka Nakamura, composer Yoko Kanno, and director Shinichirō Watanabe was a work of pastiche. This sci-fi Western noir drew on influences such as Aerosmith and Bruce Lee as well as Jean-Luc Godard. It was a refreshing blend of melancholy and action, with a touch of humor. Nemec’s series is more a bricolage of the original anime’s most notable scenes and moments than a point-for-point recreation, but any reference leaves it inescapably dwarfed by its predecessor. This new anime takes the subtextual elements of the original anime, renders them as text and uses it to its advantage, while taking a less ambiguous, more crude and humorous approach.

It is especially evident when the bold but ultimately ineffective way you present it. Bebop writers reorient the man trio’s personalities. Pineda’s Faye Valentine comes across as significantly less confident. Instead of reinventing her life after trauma and loss, the amnesiac woman seems trapped in the middle of the process. She is haunted and unable to forget the things that were lost. Live-action Faye’s dialogue is explicit and vulgar, but implicitly more morose. She uses profanities more often than she should, making her more eager to keep a relationship with Spike or Jet.

John Cho treads a fine line in his rendition of Spike Spiegel, though one that leans more visibly haunted and world weary than blithely resigned to his own metaphorical and literal “death,” à la Spike in the original series. Jet Black is an ex-cop who became a bounty hunter and served as a father figure to the dysfunctional Bebop family dynamics in the anime. He’s trying to reconcile his relationships with his daughter and wife after a stint in prison. These aren’t the band of wayward souls in the anime who circled one another out of a shared sense of unspoken loss, but communal co-workers who shoot the shit and go bowling with one another as they gallivant across the stars hunting bounties. As the actors work to perfect their looks, this understated feeling of ennui, rumination about the past and multifacetedness that was the hallmark of the Bebop crew feels lost.

The original is one of the best aspects. Cowboy BebopIts distinctive representation of the future is what makes it so special. While humanity had colonized the planets of the solar system in the wake of a disaster that had rendered much of Earth’s surface uninhabitable, those colonies themselves grew to resemble distinctly terrestrial locales like New York, Hong Kong, Tijuana, and Marrakesh. That choice on part of the production team imbued the anime’s world with an intriguing sense of anachronistic realism, allowing the show’s writers to riff on the genres of noir and western while still existing in a science fiction mode.

While the design of Netflix’s Cowboy BebopWhile many locations are faithfully replicated in the anime’s animation, they often seem more like cartoons than real places that people gather and live. Ironically, live-action shows can make the locations the characters go feel more flat and superficial than the ones in anime. As with the tone, Netflix’s BebopIt is too easy to imitate its world, but not enough to truly explore and probe it. It’s difficult for viewers to understand the context of these scenes. There are 10 episodes that bounce around between different planets. Even space travel ends up being featured so sparingly throughout the series that the conspicuous absence of any dogfights involving Spike’s Swordfish II or Faye’s Red Tail spacecraft itself can’t help but feel like a missed opportunity for the season.

Geoffrey Short/Netflix.

Throughout season 1, Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop It feels disconnected from Kanno’s soundscape, which will continue to provide music for the live-action series. But even that only further underscores just how indebted the Netflix show is to the 1998 original — for as much as the live-action Cowboy BebopIt attempts to be its own entity and adopt the characters and universe of its respective world. Cowboy BebopThe strongest elements of anime aren’t what they add in but what they lift wholesale from the original. It doesn’t need to be the anime, it can’t be; but the crucial element that the new series lacks, and that the original anime exuded in abundance, is a confidence in its own voice. For all the inspiration it took from other forms of art and music, 1998’s Cowboy BebopFeels like it has been curated into something unique. This new series just amplifies the volume.

Live-action has a unique tone, is neon-infused, exaggeratedly performed, and it’s outrageous, outlandish. Cowboy BebopThe ambitious series project is its own thing. The creative team has iterated on the personality-forward style and storytelling of Shinichirō Watanabe while attempting to update that story for a global, binge-ready audience. The execution is not always in sync, so fans are left to think about the similarities. Those divorced from memories of the 1998 series may see something different in lighthearted-yet-excessively-violent interpretation of the material, but as a blip in the timeline of Cowboy Bebop’s legacy, Netflix’s first live-action series is a failure, however noble and interesting. It might simply be true that what works in animation doesn’t work well in live action. Cowboy BebopThere is new evidence.

Cowboy BebopNetflix premieres Nov. 19