Forum - View topicINTEREST: Shinichiro Watanabe Spills the Tea on the Live-Action Cowboy Bebop, The Animatrix
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jdnation
Posts: 2007 |
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You know what to do Watanabe... Do like Toriyama did... Make a new Cowboy Bebop anime movie to wash out the stain of the live-action abomination!
They should'a known that would never be the case the moment Faye-gate happened. Once again progressivism stuck its nose where it wasn't needed or welcome and floored the accelerator. The original works as it is and is loved all this time for a reason. Neither the fandom nor humanity magically changed overnight. Maybe the small revolving door of back-patting people in Hollywood thought they could improve upon perfection with their own agenda nonsense, but as we've seen from box-office flop to flop to streaming losses, they clearly don't know what the market wants anymore. It's only about what they want, and they expect you to open your mouth and accept their feeding tube like little baby birds. There has rarely to never been a case of anime creators being super-involved with the Hollywood product. As Watanabe described, it's not even that they don't want to. The Americans have a habit of kissing your ass until the forms are signed and then they keep you away as much as possible or try to reign your creativity in, to absurd degrees, just because they can! They want to feel they had some input on the creativity to feel smug about themselves in magazine interviews. Or the product hawkers come in where maybe you gotta change Spike's suit to Yellow, all so that you can claim greater merchandising percentages on your "creation" versus the original designers/rights holders who get cut out as much as possible. That's the dirty little secret behind much of what Hollywood is masquerading as 'progressivism' and 'diversity' - change for the sake of merchandising cuts and to claim they've added something entirely new in a bid to claim a greater stranglehold over someone else's property. It's as that System of a Down song warned, you should've never trusted Hollywood... |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5987 |
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Neither is citing your sources unless you have none to cite. Not that it would matter anyway since the majority of the discourse on the subject was overwhelmingly negative than positive. |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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CrimeVsCrime
 Posts: 30 |
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That's what all the normal anime fans were saying but the media outlets, journalists, critics, and so forth were dying on the hill of defending it and playing positive PR spins for it. All the media discussion surrounding the changes made to characters like Jet, Faye, and Gren for months leading up to the series airing were dominated by the usual thing of if you didn't like the changes you were just an incel, a racist, and similar insults. The usual thing that happens every time a new remake or adaption happens. Just because the show flopped and Watanabe is now dunking on it himself doesn't mean we just pretend all that grandstanding didn't happen and let people try to sweep all that under the rug out of embarrassment. It means we wait to do it all again with One Piece and then the next western adaption of an anime that makes the same changes again because outrage marketing is the only way studios know how to market anything these days and we all play into their game because we have nothing better to do. |
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Cardcaptor Takato
 Posts: 4881 |
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2216 |
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Watanabe's unapologetic opinions are very refreshing. Here's to him decking that exec one day.
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SHD
Posts: 1752 |
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Thing is, a whole lot of complaints about the changes made to these characters were in fact racist, queerphobic and men being (or pretending to be, anyway) insulted that Faye didn't look like a walking sex object. (And before anyone starts with the "omg we can't even criticize anymore" spiel, there's a difference between "I understand that Faye's original costume would look weird and make it difficult to take her seriously in a live action show, but I still don't like the character's current costume" and "ugh woke feminazis ruin a character again" etc.) And Watanabe's comments about why he think the show sucked do literally nothing to validate these complaints. As far as I'm concerned, the show did indeed suck, but that was because it was made by people who understood nothing about Cowboy Bebop - not the characters, not the story and its messages, not the general vibe, nothing. It didn't suck because Faye's boobs and butt weren't spilling out of her outfit, or because Jet was black, or any other thing. (Hell, as far as I'm concerned Faye and Jet were the characters who skewed closest to their original counterparts, especially Jet.) |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4398 Location: New York |
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One could argue the failure of the style of the show (outfits, scenery, not necessarily casting although Ed was...yeah) was a symptom of their failure to understand the substance. The aptest criticism I saw of Bebop online was a rather well-written treatise that pointed to the original show having a rather firm backdrop of class struggle, with three people chewed up by the system, Faye by her debt, Spike by the Syndicate, Jet by his former job, and forced to eke out an existence and have adventures in a system that utterly failed all of them. Netflix Bebop completely missed that issue, the struggle, the vulnerability, and the distance that Watanabe prided himself on as a coping mechanism. And I think Watanabe noticed that with how badly they failed to capture his style, reasoning they didn't capture anything else either. |
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SHD
Posts: 1752 |
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Yes, I agree, but even on a less abstract level it completely misunderstood the characters - just look at the utter mess they made of Vicious and Julia and Spike's entire backstory, they completely missed the reason behind Vicious' obsession with Spike, haunting him like a vengeful ghost, the role of Julia, the whole thing with Spike half-living in the past and not being able/willing to move on, and so on and so forth. It also didn't understand the vibe of the anime, the homages and inspirations - not the crime action/noir aspect, not the comedy, not the drama... It was like despite claiming to be Bebop superfans, their only takeaway from the anime was the most superficial sense of "COOOOOOOL" and "JAZZZZ" and "COOL ACTION" and nothing else. And to make it even worse, their own sense of "cool" was also the most superficial, most uninspired "YEAH, WHEDON DID COOL LET'S DO THAT BUT IN THE MOST UNINSPIRED WAY POSSIBLE!" Like, I completely understood why Watanabe bailed after just one scene, the dialogue was like a fifteen year old thinking that the way to write cool lines and cool dialogue was to ape the most quippy, most overwritten, most inane Whedonesque dialogues ever, where all they do is quip but actually say nothing. It was just painful. |
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Cardcaptor Takato
Posts: 4881 |
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In all honesty I don’t even mind that they didn’t “understand” the concepts of the original because I feel like a compelling remake should be able to take the concepts of the original and put their own unique spin on it. As far as the main trio are concerned, I think they did a fine job of what an Americanized version of what Spike Jet and Faye would be like, but I put that more on the talents of the cast than anything who I think all did a solid job with the material they had to work with. Putting aside the cheesy dialog, I think the biggest issue I had was a lack of commitment to a clear vision where it seemed like they wanted do new original stories with the characters but also felt like they had to constantly pay homage to the anime that they end up not succeeding in either. I think it could have turned out better if it was the main cast set in the Bebop world but all new original stories and nothing connected to Vicious. I also think the weird way American TV shows insist on everything being a full hour worked against it as there were points in the episodes I actually enjoyed and thought were fun ideas but also a lot of points I kept checking the clock to see when it ended. They probably would have tighter pacing if they went with 30 min episodes like the anime or even just had the season be six episodes instead of ten.
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tygerchickchibi
 Posts: 1454 |
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I think I have mixed opinions on his opinion lol.
He says that he was the consultant but decided against going further than that. He clearly didn't want to be involved further? If he only watched the first 5 minutes, it makes me wonder how much of the "consultation" provided was influenced in the series as a whole. Considering that a lot of the production involved were big fans of the show, this must be disappointing. I guess it's that vague enough to where we'll never know. If he decided to be involved, I personally don't think the fandom's opinion of the show would change, honestly. Other than the dialogue, I don't particularly see much improvement on his end. A lot of his work with space futuristic stuff is more or less the same to me. Animation is very different from live action production, regardless of where it is produced, so eh. Hajime Isayama helped produce the live action movie of Attack on Titan and it wasn't all that great. But the manga and anime survived without issue. Maybe it's just me, but seems like he's over Cowboy Bebop in general. His attitude is that it was great when it came out, but that's all. He doesn't want to make another adaptation or reboot anime. I don't really feel much different about the series. I liked it enough, and it didn't work out. Edit: Wantanabe's criticism somehow is not supposed to be justification for hot-takes that were clearly racist/sexist/ and transphobic. That's just plain old bigotry. Edit 2: The Animatrix situation though is kind of ironic... because he's doing an interpretation of a popular franchise, but the person was gatekeeping it on behalf of the Wachowski sisters. Must have been annoying dealing with someone like that, because I'm sure they thought he was a small fry that couldn't possibly "understand" the matrix. Oh well, the cycle continues. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5987 |
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And yet.
Comments like the above have been made by those same people you’ve alluded to which had no merit, common sense, or logic guiding it. And pretty blatant in their messaging and intent. Also not accusing JDNation of being an incel or racist though some of this criticism is wonky though. |
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FormX
Posts: 50 |
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This answer from Matt Owens probably the source for Oda being heavily involved |
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