Cowboy Bebop

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.

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.

Good acting, the actors have swag. It's a good serie it's anything you have seen before. Right amount of humor and action. You will like this series if you like anything surrounding sci fi space movies/series. Interesting story to follow too, this will not disappoint. Usually asian actors are the bad guys in action movies/series, but not in this one.

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.