Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop Shows Hollywood Still Can’t Take Anime Seriously

Usually when a new movie or TV show comes out, there’s a pretty good split between the audience’s reaction, and the critical consensus. With Netflix’s live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, the critics and the audience seem to be almost in exact agreement. Currently, Rotten Tomatoes’s Tomatometer stands at 49%, while the Audience score is just slightly better at 53%. And while Cowboy Bebop may have made it into the Netflix top ten, regardless of whatever commercial success they found from it, they have, by no means, hit it out of the park.

Ultimately, Netflix’s failure to create a meaningful live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop stems from the same problem Hollywood has had in adapting anime to live action for years. Filmmakers just can’t seem to take Anime seriously. This is an error made particularly ironic in the reimagining of the very show that elevated anime to the status of an art form more than two decades ago.

Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop could have been the show that turned the tide and presented a show as artfully done as the original. But it did not.

The thing is, what makes Cowboy Bebop the anime so good is the art put into it. Even its iconic moments and images, while mimicked by the live action version, don’t come off as poignantly. Originally well-crafted characters, like the coldblooded vicious, become farcical rip offs of other contemporary villains.

The two things the show does get right, the action and the effects, aren’t enough to carry the weight of disappointment the rest of the piece conveys.

Anime Needs a “Batman Begins” Moment

Given the insane number of high quality, and even critically acclaimed super hero movies that have come out over the course of the last two decades, we often neglect to remember the super hero genre’s checkered past. Anime adaptations suffer from many of the same problems that plagued super hero movies pre 2000s. How do you make essentially cartoon characters, with their single outfits that they wear to save artists time, believable in a live action world?

Indeed, the live action version gets the aesthetics right. Almost too right. Jet’s uniform, spike’s suit, Faye’s outfit, and even the yellow couch all match what was in the show spot on. But then again, who wears the same suit every single day in real life? You don’t think about it in the anime version because this is just part of the medium. But in live action, Spike wearing a strange suit that doesn’t really seem to fit him in almost every single scene eventually starts to feel at odds with the colorful and varied world around him.

Batman begins handled these difficulties deftly by going hyper realistic. Batman’s suit is made to look like something you might actually see someone wear. The same can be said about his gadgets, even his car. Director Christopher Nolan took a character with a history of cheesiness and explored what it would be like if that character existed in our world. Cowboy Bebop simply did what just about every other anime adaptation has tried to do – create an artless spectacle of people cosplaying as our favorite characters.

Quality Filmmaking Is Needed to Match the Artistry of Cowboy Bebop

Ultimately, Netflix bit off more than they could probably chew from the start. And they attempted to take the easy way out. In order for the live action to stand up to the original, and be a satisfying adaptation, it needed to be an artistically crafted show. It is in the incredible detail, the effort put into every image and every line of dialogue that makes cowboy bebop a legendary installment in anime.

Perhaps shortening the run time of the each episode and following the episodic, standalone nature of each “Session” in the original Bebop would have served this purpose rather than following the once radical but now tried and true methods of drama television show making.

Indeed, one of the most startling aspects of Cowboy Bebop is in its almost Hemingwayesque storytelling. The characters are icebergs. Most of who they are is lying under the surface. Only in a few episodes do we get real glimpses into their pasts and what the overarching story will be. That makes these moments stand out like fireworks in an otherwise empty sky. And the few episodes that do provide exposition are the irregularity. The rest are simply episodic narratives with weight of their own.

Well…so much for Netflix’s stab at bringing our favorite space cowboy’s to life. I guess you’ll just have to carry that burden.