I had watched the first episode and really endorsed the take, I think expressed somewhere in this thread, that it came off as cosplay of the show. Then I took Thanksgiving and the weekend off spending it with family including two of my adult sons, and over the weekend we binged it together. It definitely grew on me. By the end I was a fan and would have definitely been looking forward to the next season, unencumbered by previous storylines. Ah well.
The stories of anime are usually not what pull us in. Some are dumb, some incoherent, many both. No matter. The style, the aesthetic, the overall feel … not just visually but in the complete artistic gestalt, the dialogue, the pacing … is the main draw. Certainly that was the case for many of us who enjoyed the anime cartoon Cowboy Bebop. The writing was part and parcel of the overall aesthetic, or maybe more, either the excuse for it, or in service of it.
I guess it is possible to say that one enjoys the subject matter of The Last Supper and dislikes the visual execution of the painting, but hard to say one likes the painting if one dislikes the way it was painted.
I am sure it is possible to say one likes the story of Frozen but disliked the animation, the acting, and the songs. But one does not expect that person to be the target for Frozen The Musical.
@Darren_Garrison, hold up the panels of your examples of anime and your example of different styles in New Mutants and mix them up. I’d clearly put the two New Mutants panels as belonging to one aesthetic family and all of the anime examples, including the CGI one, as another. I clearly accepted the diverse selection of Star Wars: Visions as all being anime-style.
Can the essence of that aesthetic be translated into a live action medium? I think this show was a fair attempt at it. I don’t think it quite worked but by the end its own aesthetic was working for me and my boys.
A few years ago, I watched the first few episodes of the Cowboy Bebop anime, and thought it was okay. I didn’t get around to watching more of it. I watched every episode of the live action Cowboy Bebop and enjoyed it quite a bit. I liked John Cho in it. The cancellation bums me out.
The reason you can differentiate it as a set from e.g Frozen or Cars is because it shares stylistic beats with anime sensu strictu. You wouldn’t be able to do that if there wasn’t such a thing as an anime style. RWBY is not otherwise like Avatar or Korra visually or storywise.
I binged the first 3 episodes yesterday, and speaking as someone who is not a watcher of anime and not at all familiar with the original, I enjoyed it very much for what it is. Bounty hunters in space— what’s not to like?
Nothing against anime, I just never got into it for whatever reason. Maybe I’ll give the original Cowboy Bebop a try after I finish the live-action version.
I’ll also echo that I saw the entire anime before the live action show (they are both on Netflix). I thought the anime was just ok - and I saw all of it. I actually got somewhat bored in the last third of the anime (there are only 23 or so episodes).
I have enjoyed what I’ve seen of the live action. Though the cancelation is making it hard for me to get through the rest, alas.
Not reading the thread to avoid spoilers. Was planning on watching this but now it’s been cancelled, is the season a self contained story without a cliff hanger ending or is it pointless to watch it now? I know the anime isn’t that long so.
The fact that animation is a medium has no bearing on whether or not anime is a medium. Media can still be subdivided. Television is a medium, but it can still be divided into Live Action and animation, which are both still media.
@DarrenGarrison has a point. If you don’t consider all of Western Animation to be a single style, then it doesn’t make sense to treat all Japanese animation as a single style. If you do refer to “Western-style animation”, then, sure, call anime a style.
That said, this is all semantics. The underlying point of the conversation is that anime is more than its visual components, and thus someone can not dislike anime as a whole but still dislike the usual visual style (for lack of a better word).
My main quibble is with @mordecaiB’s assertion that all anime is crudely animated. I don’t know anyone who could look at Studio Ghibli’s work and say it is crudely animated. Anime often has budget limitations, but the same is true of Western Animation. People don’t look at, say, the Flintstones and say that all Western animation is crudely animated.
It makes sense, however, that @mordecaiB may not have liked the visuals so much in Cowboy Bebop but thought the rest of the show would make for a good (Western) live action series. And then he can be disappointed by the execution.
The ad hominem attack of “your opinion doesn’t count because you don’t like anime” makes no sense.
No. “TV” is a delivery method, not a medium, in the sense that “animation” and “live action” (and “painting” and “interpretive dance”) are media.
I didn’t say I did consider it a single style. I said it shared distinguishable stylistic elements (not all of which are visual). Or else “anime-influenced animation” would make no sense as a category, but it very much does. A point you quoted yet failed to refute.
actually in the original series the dog (aka datadog)had some implanted file that was seriously important which is why everyone was looking for it the running joke was no one on the bebop know how to access it so we never knew what it was so important
Well, I shouldn’t have said all, but basically everything I have watched is crudely animated. I’m talking the actual movement of the characters, rather than how they are drawn. People don’t move like people really do. One big example of what I think of as poor animation that is fairly widespread is the still drawing of the character while the background moves behind them. Or a still of someone with a solid color background with “motion lines” drawn in to make it look like the character is moving, rather than animating the character itself.
If the story is interesting enough, I can still watch it. Just off hand I’ve watched Spirited Away ( I think that’s a Ghibli) and Full Metal Alchemist. They were good enough story wise that I could let the rest slide and enjoy it.
As for Whack-a-Mole’s comment, it just makes no sense. I tried to read Lord of the Rings when I was a kid. Bored me to tears and I found myself skipping whole chapters. To this day, you couldn’t pay me enough for the time it would take me to slog thru those books. But when the movies came out I watched them as soon as they were available to stream. They are right at the top of the list for fantasy movies and I loved all of them.
Another example is “hard” science fiction. I usually pass on the books because the excessive detail is lost on me. I really don’t care about the fifty pages of details explaining how you cannibalized parts of your ship to make sensors to monitor the wormhole. In the movie you can just say “We’ll need to build them from scratch, Commander.” “Make it so, First Sensor Guy.” Cut away to a shot of sensors being launched into position. Fifty pages down to twenty seconds of screen time. That’s a much better option to me.
It mostly means “animation designed to resemble anime adapted from contemporary shounen manga, typically action or moeblob stuff.” You don’t see Netflix making series that look like anime from the 70s, 80s, or 90s (including Akira, which IMHO has butt-ugly character design). You don’t see Netflix anime that looks like Ranma 1/2 or Urusei Yatsura or Doraemon or Dr. Slump or Princess Tutu or Sailor Moon. You don’t see Netflix anime that looks like My Neighbors the Yamadas or The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. What you get is a restricted subset of anime design styles based on a stereotyped view on what anime looks like.
I thought it was good, and I don’t understand the hate. But I don’t mind it only having one season. Too many shows go on too long. One season is fine, I don’t need any more. And I enjoyed it.
I watched the anime version for the first time before watching the live action version. The original had a great premise, solid visuals, great original music, occasionally interesting characters, and a few memorable moments. Some of it seemed nonsensical and much of it dragged along. The highlights made me stick with it and I was glad to see what the fuss was about…
The live version had a much tighter and better fleshed out narrative structure. The main cast was solid although, in my opinion, Cho as Spike Spiegel was my third favorite out of three. Much like Frasier, the supporting players were much better than the ostensible lead. The worst part of the cast was Julia who was just wooden in the role. It didn’t help that her signature song, the one that should have made all the boys swoon, was ear bleedingly awful in the a capella version and still really bad with a band’s backing. I liked that Vicious got a back story and an understandable motive instead of just being evil for the sake of evil. I also liked seeing a bit more of how the Syndicate operated. The animated Syndicate was inscrutable.
The live series got flak online for departing from the original series but I think it captured the spirit of the original. They tweaked the new one to add enough novelty that it didn’t feel like shot-for-shor remake. Unfortunately, some of the departures included hitting you over the head with jokes that weren’t worth a groan.
Overall, I thought the new version was better than the original. Sadly though, it pales in comparison to Firefly, which took the same basic rogues-in-space western and managed to build in hilarious bits, stronger character differentiation and development, greater pathos, and overall greater world building in roughly the same number of episodes. I’m a little disappointed to see Cowboy Bebop cancelled but I hope it makes some space in Netflix’s production budget for some similarly themed show.
Also, given that the series ended with Julia taking the reins of the Syndicate, I assume the second season would have heavily focused on her and Vicious until Vicious inevitably escaped and blah, blah, blah. She would have been a lead weight in the subsequent season so we probably didn’t miss much.
I just finished it last night. Not having to deal with the weight of worrying whether or not it lived up to the anime, I thought it was pretty enjoyable. I would have stuck with it for another season.
One thing I thought was weird that had absolutely nothing to do with the show itself was the fact that Netflix screwed up correctly labeling the length of several episodes. A bunch of them are supposedly 60 minutes long when they turn out to be, like, 45 minutes or whatever. I’ve subscribed to Netflix for several years and I can’t recall ever seeing mistakes like that before.