My Last Will and Testament – Cowboy Bebop Review

If you are reading this, I regrettably have to have to inform you that I have passed away. Most likely murdered by those I love most – those whom I thought were my friends, that later turned against me. I have been crucified as a martyr, but I die happy, knowing that I will be a shining example of those who refuse to cave in to peer pressure.

Melodramatics aside, you probably guessed this is a review of Cowboy Bebop, an anime that’s fairly old now – dating back to 1998 as its original air date. It consisted originally of 26 episodes, but was successful enough for a feature film, Knocking on Heaven’s Door to be released after. This review will incorporate that into itself, but maybe later I’ll do a separate one for it.

Anyway, so I had heard a lot about Bebop, even hearing it being described as “The Grandfather of modern anime” and it topped the favourites list of several people I’ve spoken to. For what must have been around two years, if not more, people pressured me into watching this show, but for some reason I never got around to it until recently. So, with all of this massive hype surrounding it, I tossed the notion of sliced bread from my mind, certain that Cowboy Bebop would be the next best thing, and leapt right in.

I can at least, prove I am not alone. It takes a lot of searches for Google to do this!

And so, thinking it wasn’t great really put me in a tough spot. And so that’s why I started this review stating my death – as publicly announcing my views on the subject will probably result in said friends paying rabid bears to maul me or something. Oh well.

So, Cowboy Bebop follows the story of a group of bounty hunters named Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, Faye Valentine and a young girl strangely named Edward. Despite how they seem to have some of the best crew around – Spike shows off his skills in combat several times, and has basically no equal, while Ed is an incredible hacker who seems to be able to break into any site by throwing digitised smiley faces at it – I can at least conclude that they aren’t very good bounty hunters. This is because despite all their talents, they seem to fail the majority of the time in capturing their target – sometimes through letting them go, sometimes through not completing their task in a certain way, so the bounty is cancelled. Whatever the excuse, when it comes down to it, they rarely get paid because something gets in the way. Perhaps having a moral compass makes you a bad bounty hunter?

Oh, one last thing before moving on. The director, Shinichirō Watanabe, said that he based Cowboy Bebop heavily on American counterculture of the 50’s and 60’s, along with most of their music. He was aiming to make Bebop appeal more to American audiences, and so moved away from the solid Japanese audiences most of the shows had at the time. Whether this was what people meant by the Grandfather of modern anime or not, I’m not sure. Still interesting though.

Plot 2/5

Yeah, I’m afraid that’s the first blow dealt. A pretty low score for plot, because in all honestly, Cowboy Bebop barely has any. The majority of the episodes have their own plot instead of a continuing one, and while Bebop has a few ‘funny’ moments, most of it tries to be pretty serious. While other people might disagree, I really tend to find that you can’t get a solid plot across in 25ish minutes beyond the fairly predictable. There’s no real room for plot twists, so everything seems to happen exactly the same way. The episode begins with Jet contacting yet another of the millions of people he seems to know around the galaxy that has information on their target, Ed throws smiley faces at a website to get better information, Faye and Spike race to capture them. They both fail, argue, come back and Jet acts unimpressed.

That’s not to say they don’t try to include plot twists though. They seem to make Faye claim she is going to leave the others five or six times throughout the show, to the point where you really don’t care anymore. In fact, the only part of the show that really surprised me was when Faye actually did leave – I must admit, the amount of times she whined about doing it before really made me immune to it. I’m guessing the writer hasn’t heard of “The Boy who cried Wolf”, or he might have seen that one coming. Even with such minimal levels of plot though, they still manage to include continuity errors and plot holes though.

Speaking of Faye, the most obvious error revolves around her past. She is frozen cryogenically (or something, the exact details of it escape me) to be awoken in the future – where a doctor tells her that her personal history wasn’t kept with her. As such, no-one knows who she is or who her family are – not even herself. The doctor then tells her that he gave her the name, Faye Valentine, as she had none at the time – he mentions that he named her after one of his favourite songs. However, later on in the show she finds one of her old friends from when she was young. They refer to her as “Faye” – so wow, massive coincidence that the doctor gave her a false name, which actually WAS her name? Impressive.

To its credit, the show eventually moves away from its predictability and short plots and goes original instead – however, I can’t honestly say I prefer these episodes. Occuring nearer to the end of the series, the final few episodes are just completley crazy, and from being slow and predictable, it leaps to incredibly random and bizarre. The most prominent example of this is the episode entitled “Pierrot le Fou”. I’m sure people who have seen it remember this one – in this episode,

Doesn't this just look a bit silly?

Spike seems to be tailing someone, presumably a bounty, but finds that someone else got there first. This man happens to be, what I can assume, the fattest man in the entire galaxy – who, despite his incredible weight, appears to have agility beyond human. Apparently this is because he has experiments performed on him, which I guess is a marginally better excuse than “magic” for something like that. However, this extremely overweight killing machine also has the personality of a child, resulting in him bawling like a newborn when he gets hurt. Because he is so disabled while crying his eyes out, he’s unable to move out of the way of a massive easy to avoid obstacle that crushes him to death. Seriously, this episode is just plain weird – even some of my friends who love the show agree.

Moving right along (I’m trying to avoid writing too much here, as my FFX-2 review was too long if you ask me) I do have to mention one thing in the shows defence – there is a small recurring plot that comes up in four or five episodes, involving a man depicted as Spike’s rival, named Vicious. While I would like to say that the times when this does come up it provides satisfying plot, these episodes are usually 3 or 4 hours apart – so by the time you get to the next one, you have forgotten the details of the one you watched before. While I do appreciate that, despite my complaints, they do try to keep an ongoing theme plot; I think it would have worked better if they had used the first part of the series for character development and had the Vicious plot at the end, rather than having it all so spread out.

So that’s the first words I use to sign my death warrant. Let’s talk characters.

Characters 2/5

Again, not a great score. But, that’s not to say I don’t like the characters – strangely enough, despite this score I thought the cast was pretty good. Bebop is filled with a diverse range of personalities that make for a good story. There’s the calm, collected and cocky Spike – he’s voiced by the same guy that does Vincent Valentine, that’s a definite plus in my book. There’s Jet, the more serious kind of guy who stresses himself over their constant lack of money and is really the driving force behind them all – he finds the targets, and gets the info. Even Ed, whom at the start I seriously despised, I eventually found to be kind of charming and amusing in her own weird way. So why the low-ish score?

The lighting on this picture, really makes it look like it could be Sephiroth. I was disappointed to see it was Vicious 😦

It’s quite simple actually. There’s no antagonist, rival, villain or even bully that they really go up against. Sure, there’s Vicious, but his appearances are so sparse he may as well be one of the standard thugs that they chase every episode. Though he does look a bit like Sephiroth… dang, I’ve stopped making Hellsing references and moved on to Final Fantasy. Anyway, it just seems that the lack of real threat to the Bebop crew lessens them a fair amount. At not a single point during the entire series (except the movie, I guess) did I ever really feel like Spike was in some serious trouble, or that anyone was ever really threatened. I just didn’t really get a feeling of power or badassness from Spike that I think I was meant to – watching him show off by beating up several graduates of the Stormtrooper School of Marksmanship while they miss at him constantly, is a little bit dull.

Then there’s Faye. You may have noticed I didn’t mention her before when I mentioned the main characters – and that’s because she’s a bit of an odd one. I have to wonder if she was created specifically to appeal to the basic male instincts, because throughout the series she seems determined to wear as little as physically possible. No matter how hard the viewer tries to concentrate on what’s actually happening, the camera seems determined to stare at her chest or crotch as often as possible – and you can’t help but notice her shorts are rapidly disappearing up her rear, as if there’s a black hole somewhere there. Then there’s a couple of scenes where she seems to have come very close to being raped, and acts all depressed as if we are supposed to feel sorry for her. Well, maybe if she hadn’t run away from the Bebop claiming to leave (both times) and run off down dark alleys chasing people whilst wearing basically nothing, it never would’ve happened. I get the feeling natural selection doesn’t quite work in this show. There’s also a porn star called Faye Valentine, which I stumbled across accidentally while searching for a picture of her on google. I doubt that’s a coincidence.

Then there’s Julia, a woman with almost as much hype to her as this show had for me. Spike’s love interest, she is hinted to be something special all throughout the series – one of the few things that comes up in many episodes. I was surprised when she finally arrived, at the very end of the series, and wasn’t the sweet and kind woman I expected but just as much of a gangster as Spike was. And then she died ten minutes later. Yeah, she didn’t really live up to the hype either, again they have this weird atmosphere of expectation, as if you are supposed to be crushed because their love never got to blossom. But it’s hard to care about a fictional character introduced half an episode ago. It’s weird though, Spike says after meeting Edward, that the three things he hates are “Kids, animals, and women with attitudes.” Yet, Julia clearly falls into this category.

Come to think of it, the entire supporting cast seems to be made of slightly strange people. Not that I have anything against them, I just wonder why they were chosen to be included. As mentioned before, there’s a huge bloke with the personality of a child. There’s a space trucker who I’d guess is a transvestite with attitude (honestly I thought she was a man the first time I saw her). There’s a group of eco warriors led by “Mom”, and staffed otherwise by her sons (Futurama anyone?). There’s an ancient old man with a massive bounty on his head, who spends his days playing chess. You get the picture; they included pretty much everyone here.

Still, to end this and move on, the cast really needed some bad guys (or rivals) to give everyone a bit more flavour, rather than just giving us the impression of watching them go about their day to day lives. Sure it’s a more interesting day to day life than mine, but still you know what I mean.

Soundtrack 5/5

Yeah I really can’t fault Bebop here, even if I wanted to. The music is pretty much perfect in all the scenes – sure, there are a few slightly odd bits, but they don’t detract from it at all. One example is when Spike is falling from the church, with what sounds like a choir singing in the background. Didn’t really get that personally.

Another cool addition to Bebop is the name of the episodes –that may seem a bit weird to mention in the soundtrack section, but there is a reason. Each episode is named after, or has some significance to music (specifically American music as mentioned at the start of the review). Some of them are only vague, but others are direct takes from song names, such as Bohemian Rhapsody (and yes I know Queen was British, but that doesn’t stop them being popular in America.)  If you have been reading my other reviews, you will know I love Excel Saga – that means I’m a sucker for cultural references.

The intro song to Bebop is awesome as well, so I can’t fault it for that either. In fact it’s probably one of the best I’ve heard, easily comparing with Excel Saga and Death Note. Thumbs up to Bebop, you got me beat here.

Animation 3/5

The animation from Bebop is weird, though not necessarily in a bad way. It’s very different from today’s anime style (so Grandfather of modern anime? Debateable). But that’s mainly because the of the style in which the men are portrayed, which I must admit I am glad for. I doubt I would actually have managed to sit through this show if all of the blokes looked like the perfect, smooth skinned girly kind of guys in most other shows of today (it really wouldn’t have worked.) So I won’t be marking it down for that.

Can you imagine if Jet looked like a Lelouch or Light style character? It'd be really worrying.

When I first watched it though, I thought the animation style looked a bit like Dragonball when it was a newish series. While I didn’t watch more than a couple of episodes, I still remember the weird style that it was presented in. Honestly nowadays it looks really rather outdated, it’s just not quite as smooth as I’m used to (I’m watching it over 10 years late after all!) So, while I’ve docked a couple of points for that, I’m not going to take it below average because of its age. While it may look a little weak now, back in its day I’m sure it looked great – and lets face it, slightly dodgy graphics never made anything truly bad. Look at Final Fantasy 7 for example – the graphics are some of the worst I’ve ever seen in my entire life, but the game is frankly fantastic.  Damn, I mentioned FF7 again.

Anyway, not going to bash it too much here.

Conclusion 12/20

A fairly average score if you ask me, for what I would call an ‘alright’ show. I didn’t think it was horrible at all, and it was certainly watchable. However, it wasn’t nearly as good as I thought it was going to be. My opinion might be biased due to the amount of hype I sat through, but it just didn’t live up to the expectations I was given. To me it had average pretty much everything, good and bad characters, interesting and dull episodic plots, etc.

The voice acting is good though at least, in the dubbed version as well. Sure, there are a couple of extras with less than convincing voices, but when I start judging something by the extras with one line I’ll know I’ll never be satisfied.

He's gonna need guns. Lots of guns.

It was alright. That is all.

However, for the poor fans of Bebop that are about to smash my skull with a blunt object, I commend you for sitting through this review. As such, I intend to reward those of you who aren’t frothing so hard with rage they are unable to read further – by mentioning something that you may or may not know. A new Cowboy Bebop movie is in the works, a live action one this time. The main guy, Spike, has been confirmed as Keanu Reeves. As a bit of a Reeves fan, I’d say you might be in for a treat. Apparently it will be out sometime in 2011.

Whoa.

Tell me what you like, and I’ll tell you why you’re wrong. Send requests to JudgeReviews@hotmail.co.uk