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Jetée · 09-06-2009, 02:25 PM

I actually love the resurrected discussion of this in a new thread; most of my innate sentiments have already been covered, and Halx's addendum is a great analysis. Cowboy Bebop is indeed exactly what it states itself as: The work which will become a genre unto itself will be called...

Bebop is a loosely-termed compact anime series, which itself bases alot of its visuals and overall feel towards Western culture, particularly American counter-culture. The series revolves very much around the music score as much as it does the each of characters' history and their struggle to regain what each of them has lost. Yoko Kanno is unequivocally the best Japanese music composer, and with her prevalent work in anime, especially the work she supplied for Cowboy Bebop, helped propel the overall stellar success of this landmark anime syndication.

Also to note, most serialized anime, I'd say a fair 90% of it, were all originally conceived as weekly/monthly manga chapters (Japanese comics). It is important and sometimes overlooked at how much manga pervades the Japanese culture, but more often than not, a manga comic tries to combine a variety of themes, story, drama, and comedy within each individual story arc, so much so that it can be very much lost in translation from print to screen, and then again, from Eastern culture to Western culture. The nuances of what is written on a page and what is implied to be via dialogue and speech on the TV can be either minimal or totally drastic.
(A good example of this is the manga "One Piece": a very good manga from what I hear, and I read the first two or three graphic novels about six years ago and thought it was top-notch, but from all accounts I've compiled, the Americanized anime production of the title is nothing short of dreck.)

To put it simply, Japanese comics, pushers, and the audience at large love "wacky"; think Daffy Duck and the Dodo bird combined & transmorphed to appeal to Japanese adolescents, and depending on your tastes, add a fair amount of "ero" and dollops of blood and violence, and you have a starting formula for a good comic. If your comic succeeds well enough, it will be colorized, animated, and set to become a TV show.

09-06-2009, 02:25 PM	#25 (permalink)
Jetée The Reforms Location: Rarely, if ever, here or there, but always in transition	I actually love the resurrected discussion of this in a new thread; most of my innate sentiments have already been covered, and Halx's addendum is a great analysis. Cowboy Bebop is indeed exactly what it states itself as: The work which will become a genre unto itself will be called... Bebop is a loosely-termed compact anime series, which itself bases alot of its visuals and overall feel towards Western culture, particularly American counter-culture. The series revolves very much around the music score as much as it does the each of characters' history and their struggle to regain what each of them has lost. Yoko Kanno is unequivocally the best Japanese music composer, and with her prevalent work in anime, especially the work she supplied for Cowboy Bebop, helped propel the overall stellar success of this landmark anime syndication. Also to note, most serialized anime, I'd say a fair 90% of it, were all originally conceived as weekly/monthly manga chapters (Japanese comics). It is important and sometimes overlooked at how much manga pervades the Japanese culture, but more often than not, a manga comic tries to combine a variety of themes, story, drama, and comedy within each individual story arc, so much so that it can be very much lost in translation from print to screen, and then again, from Eastern culture to Western culture. The nuances of what is written on a page and what is implied to be via dialogue and speech on the TV can be either minimal or totally drastic. (A good example of this is the manga "One Piece": a very good manga from what I hear, and I read the first two or three graphic novels about six years ago and thought it was top-notch, but from all accounts I've compiled, the Americanized anime production of the title is nothing short of dreck.) To put it simply, Japanese comics, pushers, and the audience at large love "wacky"; think Daffy Duck and the Dodo bird combined & transmorphed to appeal to Japanese adolescents, and depending on your tastes, add a fair amount of "ero" and dollops of blood and violence, and you have a starting formula for a good comic. If your comic succeeds well enough, it will be colorized, animated, and set to become a TV show. __________________ As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world (that is the myth of the Atomic Age) as in being able to remake ourselves. —Mohandas K. Gandhi