Cowboy Bebop

Cowboy Bebop is a live adaptation of a popular anime featuring a group of space bounty hunters nicknamed 'cowboys' who roam the now-populated solar system a few centuries in the future. The tone of the series is light-hearted, featuring typical down-on-their-luck yet likeable main characters who stumble their way into victories against equally incompetent bad guys. It's basically all in good fun.

It's universe is a combination of Americana influences from the '50's up to the '70's, Japanese mafia tropes and old-skool visceral science fiction, with a film noir-detective glue that holds it together. It consist of over-the-top but well designed set pieces with characters that find themselves in absurd situations, mostly created by their own antics. Fair warning, it can get pretty bloody at times between all the sarcasm, true to anime heritage.

The music is excellent, especially the jazz pieces from all the greats that seem hand-picked to fit the scenes. It's general feel is reminiscent of comic books, with lots of different color schemes, shots from strange angels and short, witty comebacks that could've just as easily been dropped in captions. Blood doesn't drip, it flashes over the screen, that sort of thing.

My main criticism are the predictable plot-lines, with one or two nice surprises. Also, not all the jokes land because the editing can be off beat, slowing down the comedic timing of the actors. On these review pages it has been compared to the original, well-loved anime, which I didn't do. Without the comparison, the end-result is a production that could have had a sharper finish, but that doesn't take away much from this futuristic noir-detective that got stuck in the seventies.

Don't expect the world and you'll root for these cowboys.

I won't make comparisons with the original animation.

I think this show in general is an excellent production. The actors are ok and have great chemistry together.

But this show takes a bold approach to the way it tells the story.

It tries, perhaps excessively, to be faithful to an Anime narrative structure.

It's a western. It's a space opera. It's a buddy cop comedy. It has a noir atmosphere mixed with ultra-over the top action scenes. All mixed in a crazy colored juice.

This cocktail isn't easy to make into a live series.

And the end result is a highly stylized TV show that is beautiful to watch, well interpreted, but not everything blends in very well.

This will certainly work for many people, but for many it won't.

So, in the end, what counts is a matter of taste.

Try it and you may like it or not.

I personally enjoyed some episodes more than others, but I wouldn't mind seeing more.

A solid 7 out of 10 for me.

This is not Cowboy Bebop the masterpiece animation. If you came into this expecting it to be you did yourself a huge disservice. I'll admit I was having a bit of this with Faye, but the depiction is growing on me after I shook it off.

Almost every sub 7 rating directly compares this to the original. Every so often I get exposed to a 6.4 rated show(Rating at the time of this review) and this is not a 6.4.

Hopefully after the fanboys voting on day one are done with it it'll increase to something more reasonable.

There are expected controversies around how faithful it is (or should be) to the source material - some points are literal retelling of the story, some are drastically different. I think it's mostly good that they're changing the story at times, it's a new material and a new medium after all. And I think they actually are the story difference are actually fixing the issue of the source material where the story was not sufficiently told in the end.

What's really great about the live action series is a visual style - it's realistic (the CGIs are mostly about space and some background imagery) yet very bright and vivid and ever-so-slightly goofy. The pace and character development is also great, it's all coming together nicely.

But it's a real hit-and-miss in the actors department - some of them are really in the right place and the resulting characters are truly great (like Spike and Jet), some of them come unbalanced (like Faye), and some are a complete disaster (like Vicious and Julia), which is really irritating.

It's still very worth the time, for it's a quirky and goofy blend of visual greatness and great characters.

Watched the anime like ages ago and went into this with no expectation and got hook.

First episode wasn't that great as a pilot but things pick up by the second episode.

The fight can look a bit slow sometimes but everything else is enjoyable. The set designs are amazing. I love the retro feel of it. Really captured the cowboy bebop mood.

And god the music... Yoko Kanno's Tank! Is that amazing that I didn't skip the intro at all. The whole jazz soundtracks feel so refreshing after watching movies with similar sounds.

John Cho is amazing too as Spike. He got the mannerism and coolness, and so is Faye Valentine. I love the witty humour and sarcasm. Jet Black also holds the team together.

Plus point for Ein. Adorable.