Every television episode of the Japanese anime series Cowboy Bebop (1998–99) begins with the same jazz piece that sets the tone and serves as a kind of mission statement for the show. In this introduction, the saucy notes of “Tank” (performed by The Seatbelts) weave in and out among the fragmented images that splash and slide across the screen. Layered within the images of the main characters and their spacecraft are fl eeting lines of text that fl ash across the screen multiple times, often broken into snippets. When pieced together, those lines describe a modern movement in jazz that started at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem in 1941. The artists there began a creative competition in an attempt to play jazz “freely,”
and this competition resulted in the development of bebop. The opening text links this bebop movement to the exploits of the Bebop crew (and presumably the creators of Cowboy Bebop) who are playing “freely” or experimenting without “fear of risky things” in the hope of creating a
“new genre”.
This innovative jazz style certainly embodies the synergy of the Cow-boy Bebop television series, for the series is offering a new take on genre, not by creating unique images and sounds, but by playing “freely” with,
“remixing,” or adapting the images and sounds of other familiar genres in a dynamic way. This artistic technique of “remixing” has become an important part of our culture, according to Anne-Marie Boisvert, because it refl ects the way we experience the world today. When fl ipping through channels or surfi ng the web, consumers are constantly “selecting, cutting up, editing, and manipulating the tide of images and sounds” (Boisvert).
For remix artists such as nightclub DJs, “originality lies in having trans-formed pre-recorded works and transmitting devices [ . . . ] into means of artistic creation” (Boisvert). As a result, the typical issue of “originality”
involved in so much discussion of art moves from the end product to the process itself—fearlessly playing with familiar bits and pieces in a way that produces new meaning. Inspired by this process of the bebop musicians, the creators of Cowboy Bebop tried to blaze new trails with their animated television series by freely remixing familiar genres to produce new mean-ing; however, when in 2001 they adapted the series to the big screen, this
Déjà Vu All Over Again? 165
direction was largely abandoned in favor of following the well-beaten path of traditional Hollywood live-action cinema.
In the Cowboy Bebop television series, intertextuality layers meaning, characters, sounds, images, and genres. This practice works to “unhinge”
the narrative structure of the fi lm and series, just as Umberto Eco argues that such intertextuality disrupts the fl ow of fi lms like Rocky Horror Pic-ture Show and Casablanca (68). In fact, Eco uses the term “déjà vu” to describe the emotion evoked by the recognition of archetypes or commonly repeated textual situations in such works. A similar sense of “déjà vu” is experienced by viewers of Cowboy Bebop, and we fi nd it mirrored by the character Spike in the series. In the last episode (“The Real Folk Blues [Part 2]”), Spike admits to his partner, Jet, that because of an earlier eye replacement, he has been constantly seeing the past in one eye and the pres-ent in the other. This strange double experience leads Spike to question what is real and wonder if, at times, he is simply dreaming. For viewers, the double experience of seeing Cowboy Bebop while simultaneously “see-ing” its intertextual references unhinges the narrative, allowing viewers to break it into pieces that can be connected to their network of memories.
In contrast, the fi lm would prove to be far less “unhinged,” partly because it lacks the remixing of genres so prevalent in the series. Instead of broken fragments, the fi lm features longer scenes that fl ow together fl uidly, so the overall effect is more contemporary Hollywood in style, despite the fact that the story is animated. Although Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (a.k.a.
Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door) transforms the series by restructuring the narrative format and increasing the cinematic quality of the visuals, the fi lm does not add signifi cantly to the character arc of the series or, more important, continue to break new ground through remixing after the pat-tern of the television series.
Figure 11.1 Opening credits of the Cowboy Bebop series with fragments of the
“mission statement.” Copyright Sunrise/Bandai.
166 Michelle Onley Pirkle
Cowboy Bebop was immediately popular as an animated sf series when fi rst aired in 1998. In 1999, the twenty-six original episode series appeared in the United States on video, and Cartoon Network selected Cowboy Bebop as the fi rst Japanese animated series to be featured on “Adult Swim,”
a special late-night programming block with little or no editing of content that is aimed at older audiences. Due to Cowboy Bebop’s popularity in Japan and the following it quickly developed in the United States, director Shinicohirô Watanabe adapted the series into a feature-length fi lm in 2001.
He created the fi lm largely as an extension of the television series’ narrative arc, situating its events between those of episodes two and twenty-three of the series. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie premiered in the United States in 2002 and was released on DVD the following year. The English dubbings of both the series and the fi lm feature the same actors: Steve Blum (Spike Spiegel), Beau Billingslea (Jet Black), Wendee Lee (Faye Valentine), and Melissa Fahn (Edward). Such consistency in voice casting is important in the adaptation of animated series to the big screen, much like the con-sistency in casting original actors is for live-action works, as seen with the success of the early Star Trek adaptations.
Of course, when a television series crosses over from the small screen to the big screen, viewers do expect some changes. Ina Rae Hark argues that Hollywood has not always appreciated the importance of meeting these audience expectations and notes that it was a sf series with a cult following that “taught Hollywood a lesson” concerning how to “remake” television programs for the big screen, rather than simply to “transfer them” (177).
When Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released in 1979, the series had been off the air for more than a decade. Because fi lm changes as technology changes (especially in the case of sf), fans of the series were greeted with substantial innovations in the fi lm’s mise-en-scène. Even the Klingons’ look had been updated due to advances in makeup techniques. Hark explains that Star Trek’s adaptation to the big screen tried “balancing” the changes in mise-en-scène through continuities in character and narrative structure (177). In his discussion of television and fi lm as distinct forms, Noël Car-roll discusses the importance of those expectations we bring to the differ-ent media. For example, he suggests that a fi lm is “supposed” to have a smooth fl ow, complete narrative, and more intricate mise-en-scène due to a visual privileging (Carroll 17). Such expectations, of course, are based on live-action television and fi lms in the United States. In the case of Cowboy Bebop, both series and fi lm are Japanese animation, or anime, and that form invokes a different set of expectations.
Anime has a well-established tradition in Japan, and that tradition is different in form and content from American animation, as well as live-action sf. Carroll’s discussion of television and fi lm highlights a few of the differences we might consider, especially in terms of narrative structure.
He explains how American television series are typically experienced as
“fragments,” intermixed with commercials, and how, with every episode
Déjà Vu All Over Again? 167 implying that the story will be continued, the series “potentially” becomes a “never-ending story” (19). Televised anime is similarly fragmented, but even though most episodes hold the promise of a continuing story, most series are created with a predetermined length. Thus they have a defi ned and delimited narrative arc, as is the case with Cowboy Bebop.
Director Watanabe originally designed the series to fi t within a twenty-six-episode arc. The fi rst episode begins in a noirish fl ashback, revealing fragments of Spike Spiegel’s history that haunt the protagonist until an uneasy resolution is reached in the series’ last moments. Spike lives with Jet Black on the spacecraft Bebop while they work as bounty hunters, known as “cowboys” in the year 2071. Later, Spike and Jet are joined by one canine and two females, all of them wanted but none of whom the men ever turn in for rewards: Ein, a technologically savvy corgi escaped from a lab; Faye Valentine, a young gambler plagued by debt; and Edward (Ed), a child hacker. Each human’s history becomes the subject of a dramatic episode near the end of the series, and Spike’s story provides the narrative with anchoring endpoints. Precisely because of the way it frames the entire arc, Spike’s storyline carries the most narrative weight.
Predictably, individual episodes of the series revolve around various bounty-hunting efforts; however, when viewed as a whole, the series arc is shaped by all four main characters as it recounts how they join the Bebop crew and eventually face their troubled pasts. Along with Spike, Jet is the other original crew member—a cyborg who formerly worked with the interplanetary police force. Over the course of the series, he determines that his police partner was responsible for the attack that damaged his body and led him to strike out on his own. When Spike and Jet fi rst encounter Faye, she has only recently been reanimated after being cryo-genically frozen, and she still suffers from memory loss and gambles reck-lessly in an attempt to win the huge sum she owes the cryogenic company.
She eventually recovers her memory and confronts her past, but when she discovers her family and friends are all gone, Faye returns to her new fam-ily aboard the Bebop. Ed is the genius child of a scatterbrained scientist who left her at an orphanage and promptly forgot its location. When the rest of the crew unknowingly tracks her father down as a bounty assign-ment, Ed recognizes him. In episode twenty-four, she leaves the group to join him in his work, accompanied by the dog Ein. Spike is a former member of the Syndicate, a mafi a-type group that he abandoned when his fellow member and friend, Vicious, became power hungry and betrayed him. Leaving the Syndicate also meant leaving Julia, Spike’s soul mate who was too frightened to leave with him. In episode twenty-fi ve, Spike is reunited with her, but instead of fl eeing, the two join the Syndicate in its fi ght against Vicious, and Julia is killed in the battle. Episode twenty-six concludes in a duel between Spike and Vicious in which Spike is victori-ous, although he collapses in apparent death. As he dies, Spike remembers his fi nal words to Julia which reassure her it is all “just a bad dream.”
168 Michelle Onley Pirkle
This dream element is one of the main threads of the series that the cre-ators pull into its big screen adaptation.
In designing the fi lm, Watanabe situated his plot late in the series’ sto-ryline (as noted, between episodes twenty-two and twenty-three), as the Bebop crew attempts to prevent the devastation of the transplanted Mar-tian population by the bioterrorist Vincent. Spike remains the real protago-nist supported by his crewmates as well as a new character, Electra, an undercover military member. As with the series, much of the fi lm further develops the characters’ backstories, but in this case the new characters’
histories actually occupy the most screen time. Flashbacks and voice-overs reveal that Vincent was the subject of a military experiment, testing a vac-cine against nanomachine viruses. The vacvac-cine made him immune, but it also took away his memory and caused perpetual hallucinations of golden butterfl ies. Vincent became convinced that the golden butterfl ies were a sign that he was simply dreaming, and thus he began searching for ways to awaken. Electra was Vincent’s lover before the experiment, but he does not recognize her until the end of the fi lm when he lies dying from her bullet.
Only when it is too late does Vincent realize that he has not been dreaming after all. Although the adaptation picked up this dream thread from the series, the fi lm’s emphasis on these additional characters and closed ending keep that thread from capturing the ambiguity or sense of déjà vu created through Spike’s double experience and fi nal dream commentary.
Paul Wells argues that, starting with Disney’s full-length fi lms, anima-tion “borrowed” the “convenanima-tional ethos of storytelling . . . from the clas-sical live-action tradition” (206). Perhaps this direction was taken in order to meet viewers’ expectations for feature fi lms and for the pleasures associ-ated with them. Although the Cowboy Bebop fi lm does adopt a version of the typical Hollywood arc, the television series clearly was working differ-ently as the form of the episodes shaped the narrative structure. The typical episode lasts approximately twenty-two minutes, with a couple of minutes dedicated to the jazzy introduction, bluesy closing credits, and a preview of the next episode. The twenty or so minutes between the introduction and closing credits are always broken into two parts that allow for commercial breaks. A cliffhanger is usually crafted in part A, and the break, climax, and resolution fall near the end of part B; the only real exceptions occur in episode 1, which includes a prologue before the opening, and episode twen-ty-fi ve, which sets up the last episode. In contrast, the fi lm’s narrative is structured over almost two hours—an unusually long time for an animated fi lm. Generally, Hollywood fi lms are divided into three acts, and Cowboy Bebop: The Movie follows this pattern, providing viewers with a setup, ris-ing action, and climax. Even the endris-ing of the fi lm fi ts into this live-action tradition. In the closing moments of the cinematic release, the villain is stopped, and just before dying he realizes that he has not been living in a dream—a contrast, as we have noted, with the series’ concluding sug-gestion that the preceding turmoil has simply been the protagonist’s own
Déjà Vu All Over Again? 169
“bad dream.” Consequently, the cinematic version meets audience expecta-tions by standing complete as a closed narrative. Moreover, because of the lengthening of most scenes, particularly ones that emphasize character and plot development, the story fl ows more smoothly than the series, with little in the way of those “unhinging” disruptions and fragments that made it so stylistically distinctive.
Reviews of Cowboy Bebop: The Movie refl ect viewers’ reactions to the pacing and fl ow of its scenes. Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly admits that as a “nonscholar” she enjoys the “inevitable ramping up of typical action-thriller showdowns” in the fi lm, but she “feel[s] lost” when the characters “stand still, chirping their strangely stilted, dubbed talk”
(127). In a later review for the same magazine, Marc Bernardin explains that “Bebop is a movie that is in no rush to get to its conclusion, and so the occasional, very well done action sequences are spaced out by languorous stretches of . . . story,” which he sees as a “welcome change indeed” for anime (119). In The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Kathi Maio admits that she is not surprised that the fi lm “drags a bit in the middle”
because viewers “expect” that from a fi lm based on a television series, but she still insists that it is a “very pleasant diversion for anyone who enjoys animation and science fi ction” (96–97). In Sight & Sound, Andrew Osmond contends that the fi lm’s “pace is diluted by extraneous scenes featuring the supporting cast, presumably to satisfy fans of the original series,” yet over-all it “succeeds as a stylish, enjoyable blend of genres and formats” (45).
Most critics agreed with Osmond’s assessment: that the cinematic adapta-tion “succeeds” in meeting general viewers’ expectaadapta-tions.
However, the fans of the series are the ones who generally felt unsatis-fi ed by the unsatis-fi lm’s narrative. One reason may be that the unsatis-fi lm was squeezed into the midst of the series’ narrative and character arc after the series was already completed. But what other choice did the creators have? Fans certainly desired to see all four of the main characters in the fi lm, but if its story was situated after the twenty-sixth episode, the ambiguity of Spike’s death scene would have to be resolved. The only real question, then, was where to fi t the fi lm into the preexisting series. The creators chose a spot near the end, after the characters were well developed but before Ed left the group in episode twenty-four. And because the main characters’ back-stories and futures had already been fully developed over the course of the series, the fi lm had to focus most tightly on the new characters, Electra and Vincent. Although both are ultimately sympathetic characters, fans may have felt disappointed not to learn more about the original fi gures to whom they had grown attached during the series’ twenty-six episodes.
Like the narrative structure of much anime, the visuals of anime deserve some explanation for their function in the adaptive process. Susan Napier argues that the visual style of anime with its “distinctive cuts” (20) is infl uenced by the narrative techniques of the manga form (Japanese comic books). Dani Cavallaro has listed some of the specifi c methods that create