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By Ryan Thomas

The best way to describe Cowboy Bebop is “intergalactic jazz fusion.” Nothing before or since has riffed on a comparable blend of ideas: bounty hunters, science fiction, classic rock, the blues, folk, opera, jazz, the harsh weight of regret and the existential despair of the cosmos. Wikipedia calls it “a Japanese neo-noir space Western anime,” which, close enough; The Atlantic calls it “something John Wayne, Elmore Leonard and Philip K. Dick came up with during a wild, all-night whiskey bender,” which I like better.

The 1998 show by “Hajime Yatate,” a pseudonym for members of the Sunrise animation staff, is one of the most celebrated and influential in anime history. The 2001 follow-up Cowboy Bebop: The Movie — screening Feb. 5-9 at The Independent Picture House — is just as accomplished. Originally titled Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, it’s got the heavy melancholy of the Bob Dylan song of the same name, while preserving the show’s spirit of improvisational élan. It’s a fitting capstone to the series and its legacy, and a must-see on a giant screen.

Both show and film take place in 2071, 50 years after Earth is abandoned following a disaster on the moon. It follows 1) Spike Spiegel, a gangster turned bounty hunter; 2) his partner Jet Black, a cop turned bounty hunter; 3) Faye Valentine, a fugitive with a fuzzy memory; 4) a genius girl hacker named Radical Edward; and 5) Ein, an artificially enhanced Pembroke Welsh corgi. Together the crew travels the cosmos in search of cash and a good time, each episode or “session” outlining a different bounty chase or misadventure.

The show’s 26 chapters were conceived as miniature films, so the jump to feature length isn’t a stretch for Hajime Yatate. It’s set between episodes 22 and 23 of the series, too, meaning it can be watched context- and spoiler-free. The only major addition is the primary antagonist, Vincent Volaju, a traumatized soldier turned biological terrorist apparently inspired by Dylan, Johnny Cash and the actor Vincent Gallo (a sentence you cannot write about any other character in any other movie).

It’s interesting and fitting that Bebop, the show that popularized and largely validated anime in the West, is itself jamming on so many American forms, tropes and ideas. It’s not a new conceit: Godard, Truffaut and the French New Wave iterated on (and stole from) classical Hollywood, which in turn became the template for Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and the New Hollywood. But the ’90s — ruled by hip-hop samples and Quentin Tarantino and David Foster Wallace — was maybe the peak of the sort of postmodernist genre-bending Bebop perfected. 

It’s all in the name: “cowboy” and “bebop,” old and new, structured and formless, classical and avant-garde. It seems to me that what Hajime Yatate did — director Shinichirō Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamato, composer Yoko Kanno and others — was just mix together all of the stuff they liked, across time and space and genre and whatever other trivial “boundary” you can think of.

You steal, and you borrow, and you blend together, and you steal some more. That’s how you make something totally original.

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Ryan Thomas is a writer and filmmaker based in Charlotte.
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