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Live Action Cowboy Bebop
Jan. 18th, 2023 11:36 amLike many, Cowboy Bebop was my gateway anime. I watched (and loved) Voltron as a kid, but otherwise, I'd never had any interest in anime. Then one night, I turned to Adult Swim early in the hilarious forgotten-refrigerator episode, "Toys in the Attic." Intrigued, I watched to the end. All I could think when it was over was, "That was actually ... incredibly good." Wondering if the rest of the show could possibly live up to the quality of that episode, I hungered to watch it every night ... and an anime fan was born.
I was delighted to learn there would be a live-action version of it last year. I've long been a huge fan of John Cho, and the excitement and dedication of everyone involved got me excited to see what they'd do with it, because though technology has caught up to the point that I knew they could manage the effects and that they'd look really good, there are a lot of things about Cowboy Bebop I figured would be difficult to bring to the screen: the world-building would have to be done quite carefully and would require incredible amounts of work to get the sets right, even if the scripts were perfect (both of which, in the end, were pretty perfect). Many of the characters, if they were played exactly as they appear in the anime, would risk coming off caricaturish, particularly Faye and Ed. Ed is 13 in the anime, and a grade-A weirdo; kids are hard to cast. And what do you do with a genius dog?
I was ASTONISHED by all they accomplished with the live-action version (and so bummed to learn a second season would not be greenlit, though I guess it wasn't popular enough to justify what must have been extravagant production costs). The sets--magnifique!! The scripts--incredible. I loved the way they stayed totally true to the feel of the anime while telling several new stories, or showing different aspects of them. The bitter rivalry between Spike and Vicious has always been mysterious; it was awesome to get to see them together, how they were best buds, and how that fell apart. It was excellent to see Faye get to be more than a femme fatale and Julia get to be more than a beautiful woman at the heart of a love triangle. I was crazy about Cho's Spike. Spike has layers he works hard to hide; he'd have been an easy character to misunderstand and a difficult character to play with all his depths, but Cho did it perfectly. Mustafa Shakir played Jet so much as he appears in the anime, it made the transition to live action effortless with that particular character. (He even got the voice perfect!) I LOVED what they did with Faye. She was a completely different character than the (rather sexist, if cool) one who appears in the anime, but it worked. And Ein was just a (very smart) dog; I thought they did that exactly right.
The only thing that struck me as completely wrong about the casting was Vicious. He's obviously a good actor and he really put his all into it, but I thought he was terribly miscast (and ugh, the hair!). There were crazy cool things that could have been done with the character, since so little was defined about him in the anime. But Vicious's character is, at his heart, cold, ruthless, cool, terrifying. Keeping these qualities at the core of the character the script or the actor developed still would have allowed a tremendous amount of leeway in developing a personality for him, quirks, uniquenesses. Instead, we got this tantrum-throwing manchild obsessed with daddy's approval who is, yes, ruthless, but hardly the virtually unbeatable horrifically competent opponent of the anime. From the first, he's far less terrifying than annoying. I liked him a little better when he and Spike were chumming around together in their syndicate days--they did have good chemistry, and played those parts well--but ... WHYYY??
And then ... Ed. I expect every fan of the anime was eagerly awaiting her arrival from the beginning--I know I was. I thought it was a great idea to introduce her in the final scene, to show us what might be in store for season 2 (which I still believed then might be a possibility) and I was so excited to see how she would be portrayed, and then ... oh, no. Ohhh, no. Where even potentially caricaturish characters were hammered into something believably human by the writers and actors in the process of making the first season, Ed came off in that one scene as, if nothing else, fixating only on the caricaturish aspects. It was an imitation of the anime character that in no way resembled an actual human being. I was afraid that would happen with Ed, because Ed is like no one else, but it was even worse in the execution than I feared.
Though Ed is presented in the anime as a sort of magical, impossible genius unfettered by the bonds of human existence, at her core, she is basically a kid who (like everyone else on the Bebop) would rather not think about reality or her feelings, is annoying and self-indulgent and doesn't listen well, and is addicted to the internet. In the process, she's become incredibly good at it, as any other intelligent kid trying to lose themselves in their hobby rather than face reality might do. If only the live-action version's creators kept in mind these core qualities rather than zeroing in on her vocal tiks and her perpetual appearance of good cheer and her hair color, they could have done super interesting things with that character, too. For that matter, they could still change direction with the character, if there could be a season 2. Gahhh, season 2!! More Bebop, in any form, would be such a wonderful thing. Aside from Ed and Vicious, I felt like season one of the live-action of Cowboy Bebop was essentially perfect.
I was delighted to learn there would be a live-action version of it last year. I've long been a huge fan of John Cho, and the excitement and dedication of everyone involved got me excited to see what they'd do with it, because though technology has caught up to the point that I knew they could manage the effects and that they'd look really good, there are a lot of things about Cowboy Bebop I figured would be difficult to bring to the screen: the world-building would have to be done quite carefully and would require incredible amounts of work to get the sets right, even if the scripts were perfect (both of which, in the end, were pretty perfect). Many of the characters, if they were played exactly as they appear in the anime, would risk coming off caricaturish, particularly Faye and Ed. Ed is 13 in the anime, and a grade-A weirdo; kids are hard to cast. And what do you do with a genius dog?
I was ASTONISHED by all they accomplished with the live-action version (and so bummed to learn a second season would not be greenlit, though I guess it wasn't popular enough to justify what must have been extravagant production costs). The sets--magnifique!! The scripts--incredible. I loved the way they stayed totally true to the feel of the anime while telling several new stories, or showing different aspects of them. The bitter rivalry between Spike and Vicious has always been mysterious; it was awesome to get to see them together, how they were best buds, and how that fell apart. It was excellent to see Faye get to be more than a femme fatale and Julia get to be more than a beautiful woman at the heart of a love triangle. I was crazy about Cho's Spike. Spike has layers he works hard to hide; he'd have been an easy character to misunderstand and a difficult character to play with all his depths, but Cho did it perfectly. Mustafa Shakir played Jet so much as he appears in the anime, it made the transition to live action effortless with that particular character. (He even got the voice perfect!) I LOVED what they did with Faye. She was a completely different character than the (rather sexist, if cool) one who appears in the anime, but it worked. And Ein was just a (very smart) dog; I thought they did that exactly right.
The only thing that struck me as completely wrong about the casting was Vicious. He's obviously a good actor and he really put his all into it, but I thought he was terribly miscast (and ugh, the hair!). There were crazy cool things that could have been done with the character, since so little was defined about him in the anime. But Vicious's character is, at his heart, cold, ruthless, cool, terrifying. Keeping these qualities at the core of the character the script or the actor developed still would have allowed a tremendous amount of leeway in developing a personality for him, quirks, uniquenesses. Instead, we got this tantrum-throwing manchild obsessed with daddy's approval who is, yes, ruthless, but hardly the virtually unbeatable horrifically competent opponent of the anime. From the first, he's far less terrifying than annoying. I liked him a little better when he and Spike were chumming around together in their syndicate days--they did have good chemistry, and played those parts well--but ... WHYYY??
And then ... Ed. I expect every fan of the anime was eagerly awaiting her arrival from the beginning--I know I was. I thought it was a great idea to introduce her in the final scene, to show us what might be in store for season 2 (which I still believed then might be a possibility) and I was so excited to see how she would be portrayed, and then ... oh, no. Ohhh, no. Where even potentially caricaturish characters were hammered into something believably human by the writers and actors in the process of making the first season, Ed came off in that one scene as, if nothing else, fixating only on the caricaturish aspects. It was an imitation of the anime character that in no way resembled an actual human being. I was afraid that would happen with Ed, because Ed is like no one else, but it was even worse in the execution than I feared.
Though Ed is presented in the anime as a sort of magical, impossible genius unfettered by the bonds of human existence, at her core, she is basically a kid who (like everyone else on the Bebop) would rather not think about reality or her feelings, is annoying and self-indulgent and doesn't listen well, and is addicted to the internet. In the process, she's become incredibly good at it, as any other intelligent kid trying to lose themselves in their hobby rather than face reality might do. If only the live-action version's creators kept in mind these core qualities rather than zeroing in on her vocal tiks and her perpetual appearance of good cheer and her hair color, they could have done super interesting things with that character, too. For that matter, they could still change direction with the character, if there could be a season 2. Gahhh, season 2!! More Bebop, in any form, would be such a wonderful thing. Aside from Ed and Vicious, I felt like season one of the live-action of Cowboy Bebop was essentially perfect.