But both John Cho's Spike Spiegel costume and Alex Hassell's Vicious costume fall into that same Uncanny Valley trap. Her costume echoes the anime but strikes a more low-key (and less sexually charged) tone.
NEW COWBOY BEBOP SERIES UPDATE
On the one hand, Daniella Pineda's Faye Valentine is a great update to a familiar look.
The intro makes it clear we'll be getting live-action renditions of "Asteroid Blues," "Stray Dog Strut," "Ballad of Fallen Angels," "Jupiter Jazz" and even ""Pierrot le Fou." So much for expanding the canon.Įven the show's costumes raise some concerns. There's also the fact that most of the snippets of footage from upcoming episodes featured in the intro are immediately recognizable as being adaptations of anime episodes.
As anyone who paid attention to that short-lived "Naruto Run" fad can attest, trying to recreate the movements of anime characters in real life just looks silly. It gives a bad first impression in that regard, while simultaneously showcasing the pitfalls the come from trying to directly translate animated sequences into live-action.Īs closely as the intro sequence mimics the original, there's a bizarre Uncanny Valley effect seeing John Cho's Spike Spiegel attempt to move, fight and run in exactly the same way as his anime counterpart.
NEW COWBOY BEBOP SERIES SERIES
It's certainly interesting seeing an almost 1:1 recreation of the anime, but this footage hardly establishes how the new series is meant to be different. The new intro even uses the exact same rendition of the anime's theme music, "Tank!". The stylistic flourishes and transitions are identical. The silhouetted characters move in exactly the same ways. This new intro is an almost exact recreation of the anime's iconic opening. If the idea is to establish the live-action series as its own, unique creature, perhaps it was a mistake for Netflix to reveal the show's title sequence as the very first Cowboy Bebop footage. However, any confusion on that front was quickly cleared up when Netflix revealed the show's intro sequence at Tudum. Nemec's comments could almost be taken as a hint that the live-action series is a companion to the anime set in the same continuity. I believe we've done a really nice job of not violating the canon in any direction but merely offering some extra glimpses into the world that was already created."īased on this quote, it would seem as though the cast and crew are going into this series with the intent of expanding the scope and depth of the original story and taking advantage of the new medium. "But I'm very excited about the stories that we're telling. It will always exist out there," Nemec said. "I promise we will never take the original anime away from the purists. Showrunner André Nemec recently addressed this question, telling Entertainment Weekly the new series is "an expansion to the canon" rather than a straightforward remake. What does 2019's Lion King offer that we didn't already get from the 1994 version? By the same token, what is the new Cowboy Bebop going to do to distinguish itself from a show that is widely regarded as one of the best animated series of all time? That's a question that's dogged a number of Disney's live-action remakes over the years. Even if a film or show does survive the jump to live-action, a straightforward, beat-by-beat recreation of the source material only raises the question why an adaptation was necessary in the first place.
If we've learned anything from the past several decades of live-action adaptations of animated properties, it's that what works in one medium doesn't always translate to the other. Netflix's Cowboy Bebop: 'An Expansion to the Canon'