Why Netflix’s live-action remake of Cow­boy Bebop is des­tined to fail

In a sly move wor­thy of Vicious him­self, Net­flix has announced a live-action remake of Shinichi­ro Watanabe’s sin­gu­lar ​’90s ani­mé, Cow­boy Bebop, while all of Twit­ter was still cel­e­brat­ing the news that the equal­ly beloved Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion would be mak­ing its stream­ing debut on the ser­vice. While live-action adap­ta­tions of ani­mé are noth­ing new – the Japan­ese have done it plen­ty – it is yet to yield any­thing tru­ly worthwhile.

Net­flix – in the UK at least – is a ver­i­ta­ble grave­yard of mid­dling to bad ani­mé adap­ta­tions, includ­ing Adam Wingard’s Death Note, and live-action ver­sions of Full­met­al Alchemist and Bleach. Cow­boy Bebop is the lat­est in a long line of ani­mé series to get this treat­ment – and it might just be the choice that feels the most wrong.

Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing the show is about a colour­ful, rag­tag group of boun­ty hunters referred to as ​‘cow­boys’, who strug­gle to get by and get along with each oth­er as they work through their respec­tive trau­mat­ic pasts. Most episodes unfold as stand­alone vignettes, focus­ing on a self-con­tained sto­ry while slow­ly drip-feed­ing us the back­sto­ry of pro­tag­o­nist and laid­back boun­ty hunter Spike Spiegel, and the world he inhabits.

Like the main char­ac­ter, the show is a very par­tic­u­lar mix of tragedy, bru­tal­i­ty laid­back charm, and a zen atti­tude – though Spike him­self is also a trag­ic, bit­ter man who ulti­mate­ly finds him­self unable to learn from his mis­takes. Spike says on more than one occa­sion, ​“what­ev­er hap­pens, hap­pens”, which could be tak­en either as a sign of inner peace, or sim­ply defeat.

Born out of some­what unlike­ly cir­cum­stances (it gained fund­ing as an excuse to make toys, they spent the mon­ey on the music), Watan­abe and co pulled in influ­ences from all over the world to make some­thing tru­ly idio­syn­crat­ic and fresh. Cow­boy Bebop is often con­sid­ered ​‘gate­way ani­mé’, blend­ing ani­mé with var­i­ous aspects of West­ern pop cul­ture for a unique but uni­ver­sal­ly enjoy­able expe­ri­ence. In a cou­ple of excel­lent Twit­ter threads, film­mak­er and Mandy co-writer Aaron Stew­art-Ahn (who ear­li­er this week wrote an equal­ly good thread about Evan­ge­lion) point­ed out just how much the show is tied to spe­cif­ic influ­ences and creators.

Watan­abe is known for sam­pling of vari­ety of styles and gen­res: Samu­rai Cham­ploo mix­es Edo-peri­od samu­rai action with hip-hop cul­ture; Space Dandy bounces between gen­res so often it’s almost impos­si­ble to pin down. Out­side of Watan­abe and his writ­ing team, per­haps Cow­boy Bebop’s most impor­tant con­trib­u­tor is com­pos­er Yoko Kan­no, who along with her band The Seat­belts, con­jured up one of television’s most excit­ing sound­tracks, and the coolest open­ing theme ever made.

Kan­no and The Seatbelt’s score isn’t all fre­net­ic jazz, either. Much like how Watan­abe looked glob­al­ly for inspi­ra­tion, the show’s music com­pris­es a wide range of gen­res, from blues to reg­gae to heavy met­al and every­thing in between. It’s inte­gral to the show; an irre­place­able part of its char­ac­ter. For the most part, each episode takes its name from a style of music show­cased along­side the jazz com­po­si­tions that we’ve come to expect from it.

Despite it being a multi­na­tion­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of human­i­ty and the West­ern influ­ences on the show, Watan­abe has reject­ed the idea that Amer­i­ca is treat­ed as the cen­tre of the world. One can only imag­ine that the show is being remade for a new US audi­ence, and accord­ing­ly to do so flies in the face of that very point. Even ignor­ing this, the very nature of the work seems resis­tant to being remade. Remakes aren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly a bad thing, but cross­ing the bound­ary between ani­ma­tion and live-action is a tricky thing to get right. In most cas­es these endeav­ours are des­tined to fail – the Wachowskis and Takashi Miike might be the only film­mak­ers to have done so successfully.

There is such a strong feel­ing of final­i­ty to Cow­boy Bebop’s last episodes that it’s clear why only one sea­son was made (the excel­lent Cow­boy Bebop: The Movie, from 2001, takes place between two of the lat­er episodes). There’s also the small mat­ter of the show’s hand-drawn action scenes, which are some of the most detailed, flu­id ani­mat­ed sequences ever cre­at­ed. Recre­at­ing this with flesh-and-blood actors and all the lim­i­ta­tions that live-action brings with it will be a chal­lenge to say the least.

On top of this, there’s the exag­ger­at­ed char­ac­ter body types, pur­pose­ful­ly designed to look noth­ing alike, and flu­id, hyper-real move­ment that Bebop became known for. While the series was fair­ly ground­ed, with a cast of real peo­ple it’s very pos­si­ble that these dis­tinct designs and move­ments will be brought all the way down to Earth, and not for the bet­ter. The show’s style, its essence, would like­ly be lost in a tran­si­tion to live action.

But then, even in the case that this is done right, there’s sim­ply not a huge desire or neces­si­ty for a cov­er ver­sion of Cow­boy Bebop. It works best as a con­tained and sin­gu­lar work, to the point where rein­ter­pret­ing it feels like rob­bing a grave, as it’s a work that feels so con­nect­ed to its cre­ators. In oth­er hands, it’ll just feel like an homage. The orig­i­nal was a bit­ter­sweet, trag­ic sto­ry about peo­ple strug­gling to improve them­selves that exists bet­ter alone.

In the defence of the new cre­ators there’s some sol­id writ­ing tal­ent involved in Chris Yost, and Bebop’s struc­ture may make it more adapt­able than most ani­mé. Hav­ing Watan­abe him­self onboard as a con­sul­tant can’t hurt either, but the task of step­ping out of the orig­i­nal show (and movie)’s shad­ow will be noth­ing short of an enor­mous bur­den. In oth­er words, they’re gonna car­ry that weight.