‘It was clearly not Cowboy Bebop’
Snap Stills/REX/Shutterstock Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, Faye Valentine, and Ed in ‘Cowboy Bebop’
Greater than a 12 months after Netflix premiered its underwhelming live-action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop, one of many main artistic forces behind the unique anime has weighed in.
Shinichiro Watanabe, who directed and/or storyboarded lots of the key episodes of the unique Cowboy Bebop, in addition to the 2001 film, spoke with Forbes about his response to the Netflix model.
“For the brand new Netflix live-action adaptation, they despatched me a video to evaluate and test,” Watanabe mentioned. “It began with a scene in a on line casino, which made it very powerful for me to proceed. I ended there and so solely noticed that opening scene.”
He continued, “It was clearly not Cowboy Bebop and I noticed at that time that if I wasn’t concerned, it will not be Cowboy Bebop. I felt that possibly I ought to have finished this. Though the worth of the unique anime is by some means far increased now.”
The group behind the Netflix sequence actually tried to seize the essence of the unique anime. Talking with EW forward of its launch, star John Cho mentioned, “We had been all in settlement that we wished to honor the fabric and likewise contribute one thing authentic. What we talked about greater than anything was ‘Is that this within the spirit of Cowboy Bebop?'”
Many individuals credit score Watanabe with Cowboy Bebop‘s distinctive mix of Western film motifs with the hallmarks of anime. In an interview with EW last year, Waseda College professor Roland Kelts mentioned, “I believe that Shinichirō Watanabe is the one artist of his era who has been capable of so skillfully play with East and West. He is capable of play with them and do pastiches that really feel authentic.”
Elsewhere in his chat with Forbes, Watanabe says that Cowboy Bebop was created within the late ’90s partly as a result of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was on the horizon. “That meant Bandai thought one other Star Wars increase was possible on the way in which and spaceships can be key,” he defined. “In order that they wished to promote new plastic fashions of authentic spaceships. That resulted of their order to make an anime the place spaceships would present up.”
For these interested by exploring the variations between the 2 variations, the unique Cowboy Bebop anime continues to be streaming on Netflix alongside the live-action adaptation.
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