Cowboy Bebop

Aldarion said:

When every remake of any property in a genre sucks balls, that may be telling you something about the genre itself. Just sayin.

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So what you're saying is that live action Star Wars is done and they should stick to animation.

It works both ways.

Dom said:

He's suggesting that the subject material is too juvenile to properly translate into live action. You can dumb something smart (well, relatively in SW's case) down and get something fun out of it, but you can't really turn Anime into something to be taken serious as they're almost all really simplistic concepts that are rather brain-dead stories when you look at them too closely as they tend to rely on the visual/over-the-top elements to work.

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Meh, that's overly simplistic - it's not like Pirates of the Caribbean or Transformers had some complicated cerebral story. It's a fair point that the visuals are a significant part of the appeal of anime, and really don't transfer over at all. That being said though, comic book movies have exactly the same issue, and that's clearly proven to be a fixable problem. "It's kids stuff and kids stuff can't be good or taken seriously" would be a surprise to Pixar.

My guess would be all of these things play a part, but that the main barrier is that one hasn't been successful yet, and the risks are too high for a unproven genre to receive the kind of backing and attention that would change that. I think that could easily change with a movie equivalent of 'Iron Man', but how likely that is to actually show up is an interesting chicken and egg problem. I'd say if Alita flops, it will be pretty fucking unlikely - studio execs will give hundreds of millions to Cameron for basically whatever*, but there's not really any others that would command the same respect currently.

*The guy that cut funding on Titanic is probably still cleaning a parking lot somewhere.

Aldarion said:

When every remake of any property in a genre sucks balls, that may be telling you something about the genre itself. Just sayin.

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Well, you never know, someone could break the bad streak. All pirate moves were bad... for a while.

I will take the argument from the other side. Good old Jean-Luc Godard used to say that you cannot make a great movie from a great book, so you better pick a mediocre book. The idea behind this is that for a book to be great, it must use the specificities of its medium, so if you try to port it to another medium, some of its greatness will be lost. A great part of what makes Cowboy Bebop work is the postures. movements and mannerisms of the characters that are possible with the codes and techniques of animated cartoons. You can use these codes in live action films with special effects (and many films do - while based on a comic book, Scott Pilgrim vs The World comes to mind), but that gives a feeling of artificiality that is often not there in the source material.

A great example of this would be Ed. Think about Ed in Cowboy Bebop and how the character moves, the unexpected ways the character enters and leave the frame. This is nigh impossible to do in live action and is destined to be lost in translation or feel super weird...

Other than this, character and environmental designs that can work in drawn/animated form very easily look super campy and cheap in live action form and if you attempt to tone them down to make them more "realistic" you often just make things look bland which is not much better. In the specific case of adaptations made in the US, you also often have the problem of a re-writting that does not understand the qualities of the source material or is done with the assumption that staying close to the original plot, tone and themes would not be palatable for a wider occidental audience. So in the end, you have a good chance to end with something that looks weird, campy or bland and that has been gutted of what made it interesting in the first place... so yeah. Not to mention the source material can also very well be extremely dubious!


On a more optimistic note, for decades there has been very good movies based on manga. Lone Wolf And Cub in the '70s come to mind, but closer to us, we can mention Our Little Sister (a family drama film by Hirokazu Kore-eda) or Blade of the Immortal (swordfighting film by Takashi Miike). It's my understanding that the movies based on 20th Century Boys are nice also. Good movies based on anime though.... nothing springs to mind, but not that many anime are original work themselves.

Never thought I see the day that a live action Cowboy Bebop show would announced, even Firefly fans would be pleased, funny enough Firefly came out after Cowboy Bebop.

Radical Ed will also appear in the series, but the casting process for that character is ongoing.

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Well you know they won't get anyone good for Ed because now that the other casting choices are out it's clearly a dead end gig.

dude on the right actually looks like Spike, dafuq

Urgh turrble but... I guess we will see

At first glance I'd say the casting director / series producers do not have a firm grasp on the source material. This will be trash. Hope I'm wrong though and that it turns out to be a pleasant surprise.

Honestly I thought Spike Spiegel would be played by the guy on the far right, Black dude could be good... his head shot at least shows he can look the part. The guy they cast to be Spike and Faye though... ugh. Unless the guy does some serious training he won't have the strong but wiry frame Spike had, and in an epic reversal of white washing, they actually managed to make ALL of the white cast in Cowboy Bebop and diversify all of them.
Zzz, guess we'll see how it goes. I could have probably picked 10 better-by-looks for the part for Spike than who they cast.

Jet's voice actor in the dub is actually a black guy and fit his character perfectly. I'm cool with that change. While I like John Cho I just don't see him as an action guy, but I guess we'll see. Chick playing Faye I don't know anything about but she isn't all that attractive, bleh. Maybe she's sassy as fuck and can pull it off but that's the role I have my biggest doubts about. Guy playing Vicious I know nothing about, but he's the only one who actually looks like the character he's playing. He could pull off him or Spike, especially if he grew out his hair a little and let it go wild. Too bad we can't get Jack Nicholson from 40 years ago, he'd be perfect for Vicious.