Review: Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop Strains to Translate Animated Comedy to Live Action

Netflix’s live-action Cowboy Bebop feels more cartoonish than the anime that spawned it.

Cowboy Bebop
Photo: Geoffrey Short/Netflix

At its worst, Netflix’s take on the 1998 sci-fi anime series Cowboy Bebop recalls the redundancy and general inferiority of a live-action remake of a Disney animated film. By any standard, adapting one of the most beloved and influential works of animation is a tall order, but the series immediately gets off on the wrong foot just for the way it looks. Though this is ostensibly a story about down-on-their-luck bounty hunters in a dingy future, the world is unimaginatively staged and overly lit, resulting in an inescapably artificial look.

The series opens with messy-haired, blue-suited hotshot Spike Spiegel (John Cho) and his more responsible, subdued partner, Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), a disgraced ex-cop with a metal arm, arriving at the scene of a casino robbery. They manage to thwart the robbery, but the resulting damage eats up most of the reward money. From snippets of dialogue pulled directly from the original series to the anime-inspired costumes, the entire sequence demonstrates a rigid faithfulness to the source material that leads to stiff, second-rate imitation.

One scene restages a bar fight from the anime, employing a POV perspective just like the original except with jerky camerawork and fumbling choreography. Little would have been lost doing something as small as excising Jet’s pointy anime facial hair, which is dutifully translated here despite how terribly fake it looks in live action.

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The series retains the anime’s bounty-per-episode format but emphasizes the recurring plot threads for a more serialized feel. Eventual third crewmember Faye Valentine (Daniella Pineda) shows up in the very first episode, “Cowboy Gospel,” and the series more liberally seeds details about her past as well as Spike’s throughout the season. And through regular cutaways, there’s a greatly expanded look at the rise of katana-wielding gangster Vicious (Alex Hassell) and his lover, Julia (Elena Satine), though their storyline often feels undercooked and unimaginative even as the season finale leaves them in a genuinely intriguing place.

So much of the anime’s unique atmosphere was built on what the characters avoided saying. They developed a comedic, halfway cooperative dynamic yet remained largely disconnected from their emotions, aimlessly drifting from one interstellar gig to the next in hopes of avoiding their pasts. This live-action series retreads familiar moments and exchanges from the anime in a more straightforward, explanatory fashion to little apparent benefit. Flashbacks to Spike’s criminal history, which the anime wisely abbreviated, take up an entire episode here and amount to little more than a generic crime story.

The series never seems confident in its tone, spending an ill-advised amount of time trying to translate animated comedy to a live-action format. The protagonists and broad, goofy side characters humorously getting on each other’s nerves didn’t stand out in an already inherently exaggerated medium, but these elements feel incongruously wacky when they’re not dialed back a bit for a live-action setting. Even a typically robust, if less adventurous, score by Kanno Yôko often gets wasted on the dreadfully overused flourish of contrasting on-screen violence with a jaunty music cue. The melancholic poetry of the original series largely evaporates, leaving this version feeling somehow more cartoonish than the anime that spawned it.

Score: 
 Cast: John Cho, Mustafa Shakir, Daniella Pineda, Elena Satine, Alex Hassell  Network: Netflix

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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