Fayes outfits are actually one of the aspects of the live action version i like. Especially the one in the posters. It feels more rugged and natural than the others do. I would have loved if they had but the bullet and done a style change across the board to get a more cohesive visual style going that was different from the anime. For me its all about the stylistic choices made to bring the show to live action. My personal desire is to see it be more rugged and natural looking like that world exists and doesnt feel like actors on a sound stage on green screens. It gives it a better level believability to me and lets me fall into the world more. But by having some characters look exactly like the anime and others look pretty drastically different i get completely pulled out of the narrative.

however visual style cant help bad writing or direction which i feel like this show falters on hard. Couldnt make it past episode 1 because of it. Like i said ill just go watch the anime and leave it at that. But if you enjoy this new version more power to ya.

 

I haven’t watched either show yet.
So far the only thing I have to go on is a comparison clip of Spike falling out a window: he live action looked awful while the anime looked beautiful.

So would you say we have another Bayverse on our hands?

 

We have another Bayverse on our hands, in that the vocal fans treat the source material as too much of a sacred cow.

Live action is always going to look hokey when going for extremely stylized shots like that. At least the live action series softens the blow a bit by leaning into a 70s camp aesthetic throughout, so while the fall-scene looks overblown, it's fully keeping within what's already been established by the show.

 

Just because it was symbolic in the anime does not mean it must be symbolic in the live action version. Again, they're two different versions and don't need to copy everything.

 

Except that they kept hammering the symbolism in the new show, just sucked at it. I don't know why you think that changing something means that it can no longer be criticized and compared.

The anime manages to look less cartoonish than the live action version. Julia shoots Cho in an unspecified area and he magically flies out of the window. It looks like he's falling at a negative 90 degree angle straight down initially, but suddenly it cuts to Cho wriggling his arms around while holding his mouth agape like a slackjawed fool falling at a much farther distance.

How did the writers miss Spike being nihilistically unafraid of death? It's something that defines Spike's entire carefree character, and why he puts his life on the line constantly both to catch bounties and/or help save innocent people. He had no regard for his own life. In the Green Bird scene, his eyes are empty because he's accepting his fate, Vicious is "the only one who can kill him" because of their unfinished business. He's already lost Julia and sees the life he started living afterwards as being nothing but a dream.

Keep in mind that I haven't watched the show in years, and I don't consider it some masterpiece. I am simply arguing that by any objective view the show is a lot worse than the anime.

Once again, I will point to Sweet Home, also a live action adaption by Netflix. It makes a lot more changes to the plot than CB does, but it makes the actors feel like they are those characters, just an alternative reality version of them. I have plenty of criticism of the Netflix version, but ut is mostly tied to pacing and skipping stuff that is explained in the original comic off the assumption that the viewer has already read the original.

 

Personally I’m down for Bay Prime and his violence where others aren’t.

That scene tho... outside of context just looked bad IMO on its own merits. I saw the toon version a couple hours later.

On the other hand, I found the walking dead show and comic striking a better balance and bothe able to coexist. For a while at least. I got fed up with both.

 

Oh, there was a newer Webtoon and adaptation called "Sweet Home". I'm still used to the Capcom Famicom horror game and live-action movie using the same name that we never got in North America (and now this newer one will make search results for the former harder, great! haha)

 

Yep. Game based upon a movie or a TV show based upon a webtoon.

 

So I just finished up the 2nd episode and so far it isn't the apocalypse. I'm on a quest for the legendary "Ouch."

So two eps in it isn't bad. But that also doesn't mean it's good. Big fan of the anime so naturally I'm coming from this angle.

Costume design isn't too bad. Jet looks fantastic and Faye looks amazing. Spike has a big uncanny valley feel to him. It's like they tried TOO hard to make him look like Spike. It's actually a bit unsettling.

Biggest issue for me so far is that most of the dialogue sucks ass. It doesn't actually feel like anyone is talking to each other.

Oh fucking Vicious. Kill me now. I want my quiet killer back, not a spoiled man child.

Anyways just my thoughts so far. More of my general thoughts rather than any critique. There's some more things wrong but the above sucks up my big issues so far. My quest for the Ouch continues. From what I hear the real pain is on the way.

I'm looking forward to it. I've been a bad boy Daddy Netboy Flixbop. Punish me good~

 

This is only an issue when the source material is treated as an unassailable bible, and not merely a guideline.

The Netflix series should be seen as an adaptation, rather than a remake, which should already be quite clear by its liberal remixing and reframing many of the anime's iconic moments.

Netflix Spike is a different character than his anime counterpart. Anime Spike as we know him him wears the mask of a clown, while Netflix Spike appears to be more surly, but genuine.

That's the trick with adaptive works, in knowing what does and doesn't play to your target audience. In this case, the navel-gazing existentialism that underpins the anime doesn't seem to play as well to Western audiences. Again, I point to Blade Runner's inability to escape its cult niche into the mainstream, despite superficially resembling and informing many much more popular franchises.


As for Vicious, I think his revamped characterization works to two goals. Most immediately, in his expanded role, Vicious' one-note personality wouldn't have been able to carry his scenes. Anime Vicious worked in his sparing usage, and the series didnt revolve around him. Netflix Vicious, on the other hand, had the ego to force the world to revolve around him. As for his manchild tendencies, I'm wondering if that was an attempt to neutralize the "Draco in leather pants" syndrome, and intentionally make him less cool, and therefore less admirable to the edgelords out there.

 

There's changing a character, and there's completely remaking them. Andrea, from the Walking Dead is a completely different character in the show, and this radical change made her hated, even by non-comic readers because she was so much less as a result. Carol from the Walking Dead and Wook from Sweet Home, on the other hand, are very different from their comic book counterparts, but you can see the same core character shining through. Netflix Spike is definitely an Andrea, because the very essence of the character has radically changed. The same is true with Faye. Jet is one of the few things that work. Even then, you get crap like this:

...you mean one of the most popular animes in the west, and the one that is often liked even by people who don't watch anime? The same show that was not popular in Japan, but massively popular here because it is so much more western than most anime? That show had to be changed for the west?  

Also, the anime wasn't naval gazing. A good example of a "naval gazing" story would be Dune. Cowboy Bebop is essentially a PI / Western admixture set in the future. It has the classic beats for both. My parents loved these two genres, so I saw more than enough growing up. Just because it doesn't spoon feed you the themes and have quippy one-liners every five minutes doesn't mean that it is deep or "naval gazing."

Edit to add a missing word.

 

Just finished watching it and enjoyed it quite well.

I prefer new takes to the anime stuff to create a new narritive/take and such.

For such live version, if I wanted to watch the exact same story, then I would simply rewatch the original... And that's for any anime to live adaptation.

I enjoyed every such movie or TV show just because of that. I love the parallels but I enjoy new concepts and directions they can take with the stories.

 

Seems to me, unseen, that this show wanted to do its own thing but didn’t separate itself enough from the source material.

If this is a case of Bayformers then maybe it should have made more of an effort to look different. Maybe the issue is that people are thinking this is try to pass itself off as a live action version of the show as opposed to a similar but unique take on it. Then maybe it could be enjoyed together and. It in opposition to each other.

 

Man, remember when Cowboy Bebop was just a really good show and not "source material?"

Remember when TV shows and movies didn't exist to be franchised, and their original depictions were carefully crafted and specifically detailed as they were to tell a story and not just a list of suggestions for an eventual shitty reboot?

Remember when some shows had some kind of artistic integrity and a vision?

Remember when fans didn't excuse corporate tone-deafness to weirdly defend a shitty adaptation of an animated classic for reasons I genuinely don't understand the motive behind?

Remember when there wasn't a compulsive need to adapt everything that was ever popular because new ideas are freaking hard, bro?

Remember when Cowboy Bebop wasn't being compared to the likes of a toyline from the 80's that was commercialized from its inception?

Remember when we hadn't lost our minds and convinced ourselves of the inevitable dismantling of our favourite media, because we know it's completely useless to try and swim against the current, so we just make excuses and devalue the old because the new entirely lacks purpose, merit, and a sense of creative identity and is far easier than living with the knowledge that nothing is safe and it's all just fodder for executives that probably never watched a cartoon in their entire lives?

Imagine we ever went back to what we were. Imagine we ever collectively understood, if not necessarily agreed on specific examples, but simply understood that there's no reason for everything to be "adapted." Imagine we didn't have this apologetic mentality of "well, it's an adaptation, of course they have to change it because that's what you do when adapting something beloved and recognizable." We could maybe just say "no, it's unnecessary, and you're missing the point."

The reality of fraudulent adaptations is such a foregone conclusion that we're actually looking at one of the most cherished artistic works of animation and saying "yeah but it wasn't that good." Why? Is that actually easier? Is that just what makes these things more digestible? Is that how far we've sunk? If you have to compare an adaptation to Michael Bay's Transformers, as a defense, I think that speaks for itself.

 

Seriously well put. :/

 

Honestly, no. I don't think we've ever lived in such a time.

As an example, the classic 1939 Wizard of Oz isn't just based on a novel, it was technically a remake. It was proceeded by several Oz movies, including a 1925 film that had a sequel in 1932. The year Wizard of Oz was up for Best Picture, the other Best Picture nominees included Gone With the Wind (based on a novel), Stagecoach (short story), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (short story), Of Mice and Men (play), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (novella), Wurthering Heights (novel), and Dark Victory (play).

Even back then, Hollywood knew the value of source material. And nothing has really changed.

 

Then you're simply wrong.

Whether you realize it or not you're literally doing exactly one of the thing Split mentioned: "Remember when fans didn't excuse corporate tone-deafness to weirdly defend a shitty adaptation of an animated classic for reasons I genuinely don't understand the motive behind?"

Lets make this more interesting: how old are you IRL? I wanna see how qualified you are to be devaluing past creative achievements just because you're desperate to defend this shit. "We were never that creative bro" is such a convenient thing to believe when you're goal is to defend a shitty adaption.

 

There's a very large gap between "popular anime" and "popular popular". And even then, the face of "anime popular" has changed quite a bit since Bebop's heyday. While it still has its stalwarts, I'm not sure how its numbers compare to the likes of Naruto, or One Piece, or Bleach, or My Hero Academia, etc, etc. in the current zeitgeist.

Remember we're talking about a world where the live action Transformers movies and the Fast and Furious franchise are among the highest grossing "cinematic universes" of all time. Netflix is trying to court that instant-gratification crowd with their adaptation. You can see that as an indictment if you wish, but I highly doubt that crowd will appreciate the themes of the original as you do. In that context, I feel they played their cards right and eschewed the headier storytelling, instead choosing to highlight some of the more easily digestible sub-themes that the anime also presents.

Bebop navel-gazes plenty. That's the part of the series where you delve into the philosophy of Spike's nihilistic tendecies and such that you laud. Its kung-fu action and wild-west shoot-ups and spectacular space dog-fights exist entirely separate of that. The latter parts are what draw in the average schmoes. The former part is what keeps a hold of life-long fans.