Flak Magazine: Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, 04-16-03

For fans of the anime series "Cowboy Bebop," the biggest disappointment about Cowboy Bebop: The Movie will be that it lacks the show's swinging-mad opening theme, though that is quickly forgiven. For non-fans, catching "Bebop" here, in what is essentially a long mid-season episode, might be alienating at first — no real character introductions are made — but it could also be a perfect baptism. The story is insular enough, and at the very least its cool, genre-bending approach is good fun.

"Cowboy Bebop" is a Western set in space with a jazz-inspired soundtrack. The main characters seem clichéd on the surface: bounty hunter Spike Spiegel, for instance, is a lovelorn former mobster who combines the cool of Steve McQueen, the glare of Clint Eastwood and the ass-kicking of Bruce Lee, while his partner Jet Black is a retro-futuristic former cop gone Han Solo who, when given his own episode, opts for fedora memories and Philip Marlowe voiceovers. Nearly every episode title is a music or film reference (e.g., "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Pierrot le Fou"), and those episodes are stocked with glass onion layers of relevant allusions. But it is precisely this mish-mash of archetypes (stereotypes?) that gives the series its charm and originality (really!) — not to mention a cool factor that rivals Pulp Fiction.

The movie occurs between episodes 22 and 23 of the 26-episode series. The story concerns a massive bounty offered on the head of a serial bomber named Vincent. While our heroes scramble to earn their reward, we learn Vincent is a deeply disturbed individual who plans to destroy Mars by releasing a deadly virus on Halloween — all because he doesn't know if he's living in the real world or simply dreaming in death. In the confines of its nearly two-hour running time, the movie is an eye-candy action cartoon that will either be digested like a Big Mac or, for converts, jonesed for like nicotine. (And it's a good hit — among the series' most compelling themes is that of Spike's waking purgatory as a bounty hunter, where he's caught between the spiritual death that came with lost love and the mortal death endemic to his profession, and the movie adds new dimensions to this idea.)

That the movie is an epic episode is precisely why it works. There's nary a sly wink of "Hey, kids, we're on the big screen!" It doesn't denigrate the poetic flare of "Bebop" that made it a great TV show. It is inseparable from the series' philosophies, but its plot also stands alone. That may seem an impossible feat, but it ends up being more organic than most Hollywood franchise adaptations ever dream to be. The live-action Spider-Man and X-Men, for instance, will always exist a world apart from their source comics, with something crucial changed in the translation. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, however, begs further investigation of its source.

Most recent anime — and Hollywood movies, for that matter — continually generates two complaints: Style supplants substance and genre replaces originality. Just look at Japan's sausage factory of Poké-shows, rusty robots and shôjo slop. For Bebop, duality and contradiction rule. Style is substance; the whole point is to squeeze blood out of stone-dead genres. That something original comes from endless pop-culture references is the series' magic.

Consider it from a Buddhist vantage: Rather than remain a simple homage, Bebop's confluence of genre acts on a principal of self-annihilation. Genre is a sort of racial identification for stories, particularly the filmed kind, and operates on a system of iconography — the Victorian haunted house, the sheriff's badge, the jock's letterman jacket or that loaf of French bread sticking out from a bag, signifying groceries. Here the repurposing of genre iconography eliminates genre, as there are no longer distinct identifiers, so to speak — the jock lives in a haunted house, wears handlebars and a badge and carries bread in a purse. A culture's shared memories become molded into a new form. Instead of accentuating positive or eliminating negative, yin complements yang to form a balanced third party. This party is the intellectual cred and pop nirvana of Cowboy Bebop.

Many could retort, "That's just a fancy way of saying it's a collage or rip-off." On its most basic level, perhaps, but the same could be said for the films of Godard and Tarantino, and no one can deny the impacts those two men had on their art forms and the cultures they so diligently dissect.

Buddhist enlightenment or not, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is still an undeniably entertaining and infinitely hip movie. These qualities alone should spark latent fans to dive into the show on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim or on DVD. The movie is, after all, but part of a greater whole. Meditate on that.

— Tony Nigro (tony@superheronamedtony.com)