Not at my pace: review of the series "Cowboy Bebop"
Netflix's new "Cowboy Bebop" is outperforming the original anime on all fronts, but it's definitely not bad.
On the Bebop ship, two bounty hunters roam the solar system - former cop Jet (Mustafa Zhakir) and Spike (John Cho), who once worked as a hitman for the criminal Syndicate. They catch criminals in order to earn a living, and always swear over all sorts of little things, in this mode the partners have lived for three years. On one of the missions, they meet Fay (Danielle Pineda), a daring bounty hunter with amnesia after cryosleep, who later, too, will unwittingly become part of their team. And Spike suddenly comes face to face with his past: the Syndicate, who considered him dead, learns that the hero is still alive. Now his former friend, the cold-blooded Vicious (Alex Hassell), wants to find and kill the traitor. Spike, on the other hand, thinks only about how to return Julia (Elena Satine), with whom he once wanted to escape from the Syndicate together, but did not work out.
The main problem of the new "Cowboy Bebop", which has already been destroyed on the Web by all and sundry, not even in its immediate "quality", but in the fact that the creators seemed to do everything on purpose to be compared with the cult anime. The mantra "adaptation is a separate work, and you need to evaluate it accordingly" works very poorly when in each episode you obsessively remind the viewer of the original: you copy scenes one by one, quote dialogues, turn on the same music by Yoko Kanno, and even leave the opening almost the same (here, however, it is difficult to criticize someone - well, who wants to give up the great Tank!). The Netflix series has a hard time hiding behind corporate excuses like “this is a different look at familiar history”: no, it clearly wants to be that “Bebop”.
You start comparing the two versions of the series, and you get not so much an analysis of the differences as a sad epitaph of the new version. Any plot and stylistic change in 2021 Bebop misses the mark. Instead of a unique aesthetics, where "hard" sci-fi a la Philip Dick, old westerns, Hong Kong action films, gangster thrillers, police buddy movies and a bunch of other "palp" are combined, - standard netflix plastic, colorful and lifeless digital picture, absolutely not suitable for a world stuck in pop culture images of the distant past. "Cowboy Bebop" would be much more suited to grainy film and stylized eclecticism - sometimes anime turned into real noir, so that in the next episode he suddenly turned to exploitation or space horror. It, just like a jazz soundtrack, constantly experimented with form, improvised, was in an incessant search for the right intonation and genre. The adaptation is much more monolithic: the maximum that is enough for it is to turn on "sepia" in Jet's flashbacks.
The original "Bebop" was stingy with information about the heroes - it worked suggestively, did not throw around ready-made transcripts of their unspoken problems. And when we finally learned something about the past of this strange team on all fronts, the discoveries felt especially important. In the new "Cowboy Bebop", the viewer from the very first episodes should know that Jet now has a daughter, and his wife went not just to someone, but to his former colleague, because of whom he once spent 5 years in prison on false charges of corruption (none of this was in the anime). Julia here is not just a phantom, but a full-fledged heroine with her ambiguous goals. Vicious is not a silent evil, but a psychopath traumatized in childhood (similar to both Lucius Malfoy and Shrek when he turned into a human in the second part). Spike's past no longer looms somewhere in the background: it overtakes him from the very first episodes and becomes a continuous plot of all ten episodes.
And the more the creators of the adaptation tell about the heroes, the more paradoxical it may seem, the less voluminous and alive they become. In fact, the new "Bebop" does not say anything new about them - it simply vulgarizes their secrets, chews on what was already clear between the lines. If Shinichiro Watanabe allowed the viewer to peer at Spike, Jet and Fay himself, then the authors from Netflix crawl into the heroes' heads: there is a series here, one of the few invented by adapters on their own, where Spike literally finds himself in the projection of his own consciousness. The charming mystery was replaced by cheap psychotherapy. And it would be fine, but this approach fundamentally does not fit the story of "Bebop". The original anime is a tragedy of extra people, passively drifting through life, waiting for the past to overtake them. And this very past always appeared suddenly, beat in the gut, deceived the heroes and left them with nothing over and over again. The new Bebop has none of this. What kind of a suddenly overtaking past is there, if every episode reminds of it?
The Netflix series is generally afraid of any understatement, everything that can make the viewer turn on his head and start thinking for himself. He definitely needs to explain what kind of relationship Spike and Vicious were in (the anime coped with this with just one shot - the one where they shoot back, pressing their backs to each other), why Mad Pierrot can fly and how the former cop ended up on the same ship with a Syndicate hitman. From the latter, the adaptation also manages to create a cheap melodrama out of the blue. Jet here does not know about Spike's past, and he is always afraid to tell the truth - because then their partnership will collapse, which, of course, happens at one moment. But "Bebop" was the only place for the heroes where their past does not matter, this is its main symbolic meaning in the series. Which the writers of the Netflix show absolutely did not grasp - like so much else.
Believe me, each episode of the new "Cowboy Bebop" can be taken apart and you can see how artfully the creators dealt with the elements of the original: how crookedly they sewed several plots into one, how clumsily they changed accents and mixed the details, which made them no longer make any sense. But for such a text, I think, no one would have had any patience. And it’s too easy to beat someone lying down, find fault with an adaptation that is so inferior to its original material.
Better to focus on the positive. For all that has been said here about the Bebop adaptation, for all its fundamental and big failures, this is not a bad show. It can be funny, periodically it pleases with a very competently staged action: the main thing is to survive some too lazy choreography in the first episode, it will be better further, and in the penultimate episode there is even a spectacular quote from, apparently, Oldboy. The new Bebop does not capture the eclectic style of anime at all - but it has its own style: fixation on wide static frames and wild Dutch corners, acid colors, slightly reminiscent of Dirk Gently's Detective Agency. Yes, his drama does not work as well as in the anime, it is too simplistic and conservative for that. But it still works. It is enough to come to terms with the fact that this is not the heir to the great "Cowboy Bebop", but a simple sci-fi "based on" fan cosplay movies with an exorbitant budget for the genre.
This is not a case where an adaptation is so terrible that it will surely discourage ignorant viewers from watching the original - Netflix's Cowboy Bebop may well draw viewers to the anime. And those who are familiar with Watanabe's work should not be too strict with him. And maybe even give him a chance. Yet Bebop's charm is too strong to be spoiled by some adaptation. Even from Netflix.
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