Anime Redemption Part 1 – Cowboy Bebop

For I don’t know what reason or sense of ethical responsibility, I do feel obliged to keep up with the otaku experts and actually watch series which are generally considered classics. It is true that I mostly overlooked such shows, like Ghost in the Shell SAC, Neon Genesis Evangelion and the likes, since I’ve plunged into this art form quite late in life. But the feeling of being indebted towards the anime community always seem to prevail over my desire to get into newer series. So I watched Cowboy bebop, finally.

And it was, unquestionably, a film noir masterpiece. The one thing which strikes it’s the refined excess of styles – we have intertextuality, we have collage – jazz, bebop, blues combined with futuristic elements and the actual eponymous “cowboy” which is a bounty hunter – an ingredient from the past thrown in a cyberpunk universe, once again a most peculiar mixture of future and past elements that gloriously combine to form a great series, not less not more than 26 fabulously made episodes.

While the anime starts leisurely with episodic periods of bounty catching and adventures, characters, background and flashbacks start to add up only to end in a tragedy epilogue that left me traumatized for a while, and had me make multiple attempts for recovery with some injection of joyful anime (just kidding, there is no such thing as joyful anime). Popular references are abundant in Cowboy Bebop, especially to science fiction classics like Aliens, A space odyssey and famous rock songs after which each session (episode) is named. This truly shows a passionate director who expects a certain type of viewers, with some sort of a musical culture and a tad of previous science fictional schooling. This certainly creates a stronger link between the creator and viewer – in a sense that the viewer feels connected to a system of secret codes with the director.

Spike, the main character, is your usual painful silent hero, Cloud Strife style, while Jet is the helper friend who would do anything for his partner in battle. We have Faye, the thief, with no recollection of her past, and Edward, an androgynous genius hacker and the dog Ein. The combination Faye-Jet-Spike sounds really cliché, but it’s actually an amazing collision of different personalities forced to live under the same roof. And most of the times the cyberpunkish loneliness of destroyed planets and the inability to find a rooting home, backed up by beautiful saxophones enthrall the viewer with such artistic jewelry that one does not care that the characters are somewhat conventional anymore.

It’s pretty much clear for me right now that these classics are not called classics for nothing.