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[personal profile] labingi
I have only seen about two-thirds of Cowboy Bebop (the first five episodes, a couple in the middle, and the last half of the series). That's all I'm going to watch for now, and I think it's enough to form some thoughts. Having seen the end, I understand better now why this anime is so well loved, though I remain bemused by its ranking as one of the best of all time (again, I haven't seen every episode). It would not be in my top five; it would be in my top ten. If I restricted my rankings to anime from before 2000, it might well make it into the top five.

For anyone who's been under a rock for the past fourteen years, Cowboy Bebop is about a motley band of bounty hunters patrolling the solar system in the late 21st century. They all have personal issues, and they all work pretty hard not to deal with them.



Visually, it's very, very beautiful. Extremely impressive for 1998, it still stands up today as one of the better designed and animated series I've seen. Also from 1998, Trigun is the better series, but its art doesn't hold a candle. Musically, too, Cowboy Bebop is justly praised. The soundtrack is very diverse, fits the series well, and would easily stand on its own without the anime to back it.

I give the show special praise for having well-choreographed action scenes. It's too common in anime--Fate Zero and Gungrave, I am looking at you--to advertise a story about exceptional fighters and then make their fight scenes so implausible that the viewer just has to accept that they happened and not think about them. Cowboy Bebop, however, has solid, well-paced action scenes that look like they involve people who actually have some training, tangling with other people who have some training, in physically and tactically plausible ways.

The core stories generate real pathos, heightened by an admirable sense of restraint. However, these plotlines too often get trumped in favor of picaresque adventure. In this respect, the series reminds me a lot of Iain M. Banks's novel, Use of Weapons. Both have a very powerful core. Both fritter away a lot of that potential by devoting a majority of their text to superficial adventures that bounce off the surface of the characters whose inner selves you want to know. In both stories, too, these adventures serve their function: the fact that the characters are fleeing from circumstances that would require real emotional investment is salient.

But using the majority of the narrative to illustrate this least emotionally involving dimension of character necessarily, mathematically decreases the opportunities for deeper development. For example, the antagonism between Spike and Vicious is interesting, but it is not very interesting because Vicious is not very interesting, and he is not very interesting--in part--because he doesn't appear in the vast majority of episodes, so there is relatively little space to explain who he is and why.

(I am saying this as a viewer looking for catharsis. Many viewers are looking for other things, like a laugh or an adrenaline rush, and I'm sure CB delivers this, no doubt, much of why it's so highly acclaimed across so many demographics. Myself, I tend not to be a fan of anime humor, but CB is perhaps the most hilarious anime I've ever seen.)

Spoilers follow...

The ending of the series is powerful. So Spike dies, as you probably knew. And while he dies in a way it's absurdly easy to fan fic your way out of, the intent in the series itself is clear, and it reminds me of how unsettling it can be when the point of view character dies. You are in their POV--so who are you when that POV ceases? Just the empty air rising into space? This experience is connected to our own fears of death. Who are we when our own POV is over? Are we anything at all? Just floating ghosts?

Those questions aside, it's hard not to wonder if Spike, in fact, would have died if his comrades had been with him. This seems the final pathos and irony of the narrative. The crew of the Bebop cleave to each other precisely because they are all wounded and somewhat dysfunctional people, searching for a "home base" that provides some security (and employment) without making any demands in terms of commitment or intimacy. In this community, it's understood that everyone has their own agenda, their own past, and their demons, which are entirely their own affair and no one else's. This makes a comfortable social space for a group of people too well armored to let their chinks show. But it also means that, at the end of the day, when they go off alone, they're alone. They do care about each other, but beyond a certain point, their tacit social contract prohibits interference, and this limits the group's strength and possibly costs Spike his life.

It's no small feat to pull real poignancy out of an absence: an absence of closeness, an absence of commitment, an absence of the willingness to face the deepest of emotional wounds for your friends. But CB pulls this off and the final irony is clear: you end up wounded anyway.
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