Bebop

While I watched Char’s Counterattack last year in June, I did not really consider it to be watching an anime—it was an animated movie, and I think even now there is a difference between the episode format and the movie format. Episodic anime is often plagued with filler and extraneous scenes as well as drawn-out character issues, which cause audience fatigue of character drama. A movie, with the constraints of time, comes out concise and less impractical in storytelling, and generally ends up cleaner than an anime.

From then, the only ‘anime’ I could say I watched is a few sparse episodes of this ridiculous anime, although I didn’t watch more than three episodes and it was not something I actively sought out. The mahjong club played it on the room’s projector during our rounds. I admit I enjoyed its absurd humor; who wouldn’t enjoy the idea of international government leaders (and ex-leaders) duking out foreign relations with mahjong?

I imagine the above two probably still qualify as ‘watching anime’, so I cannot say for absolute that I did not watch anime for a year. The last full-length anime I watched and actively followed is Gundam 00, which I have actually not watched again since its conclusion in April 2009.

In a time like this, when I am approaching the conclusion of my junior year in college and logically should have very little time on my hands, being a part-time worker and also swamped with final projects and finals, it should be strange that I managed to finish a 26-episode anime in two weeks. Thinking about it though, it’s not particularly insane; back in freshman year, with a lot of time on my hands, I generally finished in four or so days, compared to the on and off watching I have now.

Part of it might have to do with how I came to regard Cowboy Bebop after six episodes. CB is almost purely an episodic anime; that is, its writing and stories are made for encapsulated, small substories winding around the same characters that suffer recurring problems. What CB does that is different from, say, a television sitcom or series or a soap opera, is that it does not adhere to a particular genre defining the overall anime. Some episodes share similar narrative structure, while others go into different territory: we have the usual mistaken identity leads to unintentional events culminating in explosions, but we also have the ‘detective’ episode, complete with background narration of the ‘detective’ and his solving of the case.

What is also unusual about ‘genre’ is the words within the show’s opening and showing up sometimes in the mid-time break cut: “The Work Which Becomes a New Genre Itself”. And in a way, it’s almost like CB does defy categorization into a genre, not only from the episode presentations but also from the content of its stories. Ultimately, it has an overarching theme that does give its story a particular taste, but the world in which the narrative takes place seems at once both science fiction realistic but also fantastical. You have your guns and the standard space battles using physics, but you also have a gravity-defying assassin making leaps and jumps and able to deflect bullets from his body, you have your hyperspace warphole controlled by feng shui, and you have your fridge breeding food into toxic goop that emit sparkles and have poisonous bites despite lacking teeth.

But there’s something compelling enough about the world, perhaps softened by the characters, that as an audience I did not care much if the logistics made sense and came together. Certainly, arguments of that sort are frequent for Gundam and I think those discussions are hilarious, but while CB takes care in crafting its settings and the objects of its settings, the focus is on the characters and their stories. The detail in setting fleshes out the stories better; there is an episode where we have sequence of scenes showing two of the main characters, Jet and Spike, just going down 27 floors of an old, ruined building. It serves not only the demonstration of their effort to get something at the 27th basement floor, but also showed the decrepit ruin of the location where they were at: an old Japanese department store, on Earth.

There’s also something to be said about an anime that never feels like it wastes a single second of its time. Nowadays there’s always fanservice and filler to groan about, as well as scenes that are written in for small-time appeal rather than for any contribution to characterization or to plot development. CB features only one character that provides fanservice, Faye Valentine, and she is an essential character, with a significant character arc. Bizarrely, I don’t even mind the moments where she is providing fanservice—there is something oddly tasteful about how the presentation does it. She is a woman who dresses sexy and is highly aware of her own appeal, so what is shown is less of fanservice and almost realistic in what she would be like normally, which is shamelessly sensual without being an overt slut.

Part of how the anime manages its time is some clever conservation of budget while adding style, although this may just be preoccupation on my part. In the episode “Mushroom Samba” in which the resident hacker Ed is running off to hunt a bounty, there is a scene where Ed is before a watermelon seller drooling over the watermelon, when a sequence showing the seller’s face, the location, and a woman’s shoe stepping out of an opening car door ‘shows’ a woman arriving on the scene. These same frames are used for when she leaves, but slowed just a smidgen down. In a way, this made the woman even more stylish and cool than she already was (her car was a shiny black convertible, and she dealt suavely with the watermelon seller), because her departure was as coordinated as her arrival.

I’ve spent a thousand words waxing on everything except the content of the main story itself. I suppose my point here is, in Cowboy Bebop, the presentation is fantastic. It’s not fantastic in the sense that the animation is highest quality and the art style is unique and attractive to everyone. It’s not fantastic in the sense of scope and sheer detail. It’s difficult to pinpoint how the discreet elements pull together into something that feels very, very cool, while maintaining substance beneath that veneer of cool, which something that stylish anime often lack, resulting in pretty pictures and nothing else. There’s an element of daring with what the director and animators did in CB, because it’s not what anime generally does when it comes to sequences of images.

Of course, they couldn’t have pulled off what they did if not for the locked down underlying plot from the beginning. Something I find exasperating and terrible is how directors adjust their anime according to how it is received by the audience: a character will suddenly live until the end of the story despite no story relevance, or another nonessential character will suddenly receive more screentime merely because he or she is popular. It’s appalling to cater and destroy a set storyline with specific meaningful events just because of the fans. Even though they are paying, the work cannot be called anything but fanfiction by then, if you’re only writing what the fans want. A story is the vision of the person who has something significant to say, not the illusion of a pile of people who want more tits.

A theme of ‘home’. Or perhaps a theme of “can’t run from the past”? Perhaps another time, in a post less bloated?

Naaaaaaah. Let’s see if I can finish this one in less than two days. (After end note: Looks like YES I CAN)

“Home” and “Running from the past”, with the addition of “Living”, combine to meet with the central theme of Cowboy Bebop: freedom. The freedom CB is delving into, however, is not the conventional “freedom from tyranny” or “freedom from higher powers”, but rather personal freedom. Not necessarily freedom from the self, just freedom from the emotional burdens of a past, of an identity, and of personal fears.

Our cast consists of Spike, Jet, Faye, and Edward. Here, there be spoilers.

Edward is the kid of the group; neither age nor sex are explicitly specified, although the crew of Bebop take her to be a girl. She has the ambiguous look of neither male nor female because her design is that of an [EXTREMELY] eccentric child. Her addition to the crew is her hacking abilities, charmingly characterized by smileys everywhere in her hacking interface. The normal person has dots indicating the characters entered in a password field. Ed has animated smileys with colored ovals for cheeks.

Of the four main characters, Ed lives the most freely; she provides a stark contrast from the three burdened adults. As a child, she has yet to have much life experience, and thus doesn’t have a complex past. Even so, the manner in which she joins the crew of Bebop is telling: she picks their name at random from a list of ships, and extracts a promise from Faye to be able to join Bebop if she helps them secure a bounty. As oddball as she is, Ed is a drifter, moving from place to place with seemingly no real direction. She insinuates herself into whatever environment she finds herself in, but ultimately does not find purpose until nearly the end, when she encounters her father again.

Her father demonstrates appreciation for his child, but even he cannot distinguish if she is a boy or girl. It becomes painfully obvious that she will never be first in his priorities when, after reuniting, he scurries off to pursue his goal without thinking and leaves her behind.

Ed is not entirely fazed by this. She does, however, make the decision to leave Bebop because she wanted to pursue what she believes is important. To her, her blood father is family and ‘home’. Even if she is leaving a home without the secure knowledge of a new home, Ed does not bear scars of abandonment and therefore is still able to forgive her father. Of the crew, there’s no doubt Ed is the freest, being young and carefree. Her ties to the real world are loose, but she is strangely alive through her own bizarre happiness.

Jet is an ex-cop turned bounty hunter, with a metal arm. He is the cook and captain. Despite his hardy nature, Jet at the beginning has his own hidden past. Of the bunch, he resolves his issues quickest. His reunion with his ex-girlfriend reveals why she left him—she was searching for a way for herself to live freely, without his security governing her life. That meeting culminates in Jet discarding his past with her by throwing out the watch she left him. His reunion with his ex-partner reveals how he lost his arm and gained a metal one—his partner betrayed him and cost him his arm. That meeting culminates in the death of his partner, who tricks Jet into shooting him.

Jet’s past is not heavy or mysterious, merely straightforward. Once he met his ex, Jet has already stopped running from his issues. The death of his partner grants him freedom, not because his partner is the remaining part of his past (his job) that he needs to let go, but because his partner tells Jet the truth about his arm, and the deceit in their relationship.

Ultimately, he is the only one of the crew who manages to absolve his baggage of his own volition, and as a result settles firmly into the new ‘family’ of Bebop as his home. His partner had offered to let Jet work in the police once again, but the partner’s death, brought about by Jet’s shot, is Jet’s killing of his last thread to the past. Jet’s stories are not particularly compelling, but they flesh out a solid character of decency and level-headedness. I suppose what I walked away with is the understanding that not even the oldest, most sensible people are exempt from troubles with life. Sometimes their confidence in their sensibility blinds them to issues, as well as their trust in their ability to discern character.

And sometimes, their trust in others hurts them when they are unable to use their sensibility to control events.

Faye Valentine is a woman with a past of debt and nothing else. Her problem stems from her years in cryogenic freeze, which she woke from with no memory of who she was. The doctor tells her she owes 300 million wulong for her freeze, restoration, and rehabilitation; on top of that, the man who acted as her lawyer after her awakening fakes his death and passes his debts onto her as well. The result is a chronic gambling problem, and her inability to place faith in people. Her other chief problem is her amnesia, which leaves her untethered and free, but also lost and missing identity.

Despite lacking a ‘self’, Faye has a good deal of sass and personality. Yet she cannot look at the future because she is unable to let go of the questions she has about her past. She joins Bebop uninvited after working with Spike and Jet twice, but continually throughout the series she has times where she runs from the ship, pretending she is leaving permanently.

What is different about Faye from the other crew members is that she literally starts out as a blank slate, yet because of her blank slate status she cannot move forward. She has witticisms underneath her superficial mask, and a character and personality of her own. The ability to fill in the gnawing emptiness of no identity is something Faye actually runs away from because she cannot see the possibilities of an identity and home on the Bebop, even though she yearns to return when she is away and hopes they will not abandon her.

But even at the conclusion of the series, she looks at Bebop as a second choice—Faye regains her memory of her past, but when she goes back to find it, nothing is left. She draws a box in the dirt where her bed was and lies in it. What she finally has to acknowledge is that she had been chasing empty dreams. Painfully she finally gains the freedom to decide what future she wishes to have, and she realizes the home she wanted all along is the Bebop. When Faye returns, however, she finds her ‘family’ falling apart.

Spike is a disinterested cowboy, full of attitude yes of a largely easygoing, distracted nature. His dialogue makes it difficult to discern his seriousness from his playfulness, so he maintains mystery until the first ‘story-related’ episode—when the name Vicious is first introduced, and Spike’s past with a criminal syndicate is teased.

Spike becomes interested in bounties only if he deems them dangerous and challenging. He engages in some bounties that are not particularly his type if only for money to buy food. Even though at times Spike seems to want to survive, his forays into death question his motive for his actions: is it for the challenge, or does he just want to die?

His past is that of a criminal under a syndicate, which he tried to leave by faking his death. He attempts to desert with the woman he loves, Julia, but in the end she never meets him at the appointed spot and he is unable to find her and ask why. Instead, Spike drifts into the life of a bounty hunter, away from his past, existing in a limbo where all he has are questions and the only thing that gives him any semblance of feeling alive is conflict. At the end, when he finally has to face his past, it has become uncontrollable, his partner aiming to kill both him and Julia, and injuring his Bebop comrades as well.

When Julia dies, she mouths certain words to Spike that we do not hear clearly until the last minutes. But her words reveal the problem Spike has with living: he clung onto the dream of being able to live freely with Julia in all his years as a bounty hunter. That is why he is unable to feel alive, because he feels like the bounty hunter reality he lived in was the dream, while his happiness with Julia could still be reality. Spike crafts this dream and cannot see a future without Julia in it, when it had already become his past.

Both Faye and Spike create their own burdens, their illusions of what freedom means to them. However, their illusions are unreal, but neither are willing to face reality. Faye dreams of her out-of-reach past being a possible home and place where she can belong, despite knowing that Earth had been damaged by a technological incident decades ago. Spike dreams of his happy life with Julia that could not exist because they were all persons of a syndicate that only allows living through syndicate laws.

Do not to let dreams cloud what is good and real for you.

What is freedom, then? Cowboy Bebop presents the ‘cool’ life of a bounty hunter, but everywhere in this lively world, people are in pain. Even the hunters themselves suffer from financial difficulties. But in the times where they were together, life is interesting and content, almost happy, providing a haven of brief happiness and camaraderie. When the end comes bearing down on us, an almost nostalgic filter comes over the episodes in which it was just fun and laughs.

Spike smiles at the end, when he finally resolves the last threads of his past. Despite how his end is to be taken, I believe the answer the show gives to its themes is not that the dreams are bad because they are too unrealistic, or that we should be content as people to have what we have, but rather that as people we cannot truly live freely and happily in our present without resolving our past. Dreams are fine, but they can only provide a temporary buffer. What we have in our hands should be cherished. We can pursue dreams because it is noble to live to pursue a goal, regardless of how unrealistic it is, but we should not define our existence by dreams. This pursuit, to a certain degree, can bring us happiness.

I think I’m getting convoluted.

CB pulls its elements together with a certain grace and style that will most certainly never be emulated to exception again. Twelve years later, we have moe. We have anime that satisfies our base desires to see T&A and big-eyed, flat-chested cute girls with stereotypical personalities enact some silly events of everyday life in animation. We demand that directors and writers write the show we want to amuse us, but fail to ask for something that speaks to the heart and not to the eyes. For something that is not entertaining but inspiring.

Then again, does Cowboy Bebop fit the bill?