Netflix announces live-action Cowboy Bebop series

[Velaryon]

Presumably you haven't seen the Kenshin ones then, since those are absolutely good, though certainly not spectacular, action romps. Now, they do have the advantage of taking an already fairly simple story and simplifying further until you mostly have a lot of kick-*** fight choreography working around identifiable visual styling and a few nostalgic Easter Eggs.

Now, this approach will not work for a high-concept piece. Live-action Ghost in the Shell tried something like that and it was a giant steaming pile of incoherent garbage. I don't think it will work for Cowboy Bebop either, which is arguably a tragedy and is super-high-concept. Heck, Cowboy Bebop isn't even the ideal space western from 1998 to adapt to live-action. Trigun, while a lesser artistic triumph, is a very good show and so much a better choice to make into a Netflix series.

Adapting Cowboy Bebop strikes me as a move made by an executive panel to grab the biggest name rather than actually considering what work would do well.

I didn't even know there were live-action Kenshin adaptations. I'm not a huge fan of Rurouni Kenshin though, so I'll take your word on the quality of the adaptation rather than seek it out myself. Still, that's one. Unless there are two or three more, that's still a worse track record than video game adaptations, which should be a very low bar to clear.

[Lethologica]

Rurouni Kenshin was adapted by the Japanese film industry. There's a long track record of adapting manga and anime to live action in Japan, and while it's probably a mixed bag, I doubt any of us have watched enough of it to make an informed judgment, and it's completely distinct from the sparse track record of Hollywood adaptations. (Side note: someone adapted Fist of the North Star to live action in the '90s? Of course they did. Sigh.)

Upcoming US live-action adaptations of anime/manga include Akira, Battle Angel Alita, Cowboy Bebop, so there's a definite theme going. Now taking bets on which of these will be best and worst. (There's also supposed to be a Naruto adaptation, but there's no release date and it's probably stuck in development limbo.)

[Velaryon]

Rurouni Kenshin was adapted by the Japanese film industry. There's a long track record of adapting manga and anime to live action in Japan, and while it's probably a mixed bag, I doubt any of us have watched enough of it to make an informed judgment, and it's completely distinct from the sparse track record of Hollywood adaptations. (Side note: someone adapted Fist of the North Star to live action in the '90s? Of course they did. Sigh.)

Upcoming US live-action adaptations of anime/manga include Akira, Battle Angel Alita, Cowboy Bebop, so there's a definite theme going. Now taking bets on which of these will be best and worst. (There's also supposed to be a Naruto adaptation, but there's no release date and it's probably stuck in development limbo.)

Good point on the Japanese film industry. I would be willing to extend a lot more trust to a Japanese studio than an American one when it comes to live action anime adaptations.
It turns out I haven't seen any Japanese adaptations. I had thought Blood: the Last Vampire was made in Japan, but Wikipedia tells me was it co-produced by a French studio and a Hong Kong studio. Either way, I thought it was pretty bland and forgettable.

[GloatingSwine]

Good point on the Japanese film industry. I would be willing to extend a lot more trust to a Japanese studio than an American one when it comes to live action anime adaptations.

Trust is a big step.

Japanese live action adaptations of anime are roughly predictable in quality by how similar they are to other movies the Japanese film industry is used to making.

Samurai manga tend to come out alright because there's a large canon of samurai movies to draw upon. Likewise the more grounded romance/tragedy stuff does OK because that's already a common type of movie.

Death Note came out alright but that's cheating because the live action adaptation of the novel predated any of the others.

When they go off piste though, it can go horribly wrong. The live action Attack on Titan did not go down well. (Because it's not quite Kaiju, the focus and intent of the thing is different).

[Tyndmyr]

I would venture to say that the live action adaptation of Death Note was not great.

Perhaps it could have been worse, but it is missing a great deal of the soul from the anime.

[Mechalich]

Trust is a big step.

Japanese live action adaptations of anime are roughly predictable in quality by how similar they are to other movies the Japanese film industry is used to making.

Samurai manga tend to come out alright because there's a large canon of samurai movies to draw upon. Likewise the more grounded romance/tragedy stuff does OK because that's already a common type of movie.

Death Note came out alright but that's cheating because the live action adaptation of the novel predated any of the others.

When they go off piste though, it can go horribly wrong. The live action Attack on Titan did not go down well. (Because it's not quite Kaiju, the focus and intent of the thing is different).

Japanese live action anime adaptations also depend, a lot, on whether it's just a cheap cash grab (which is far more common) or if the people involved are actually trying, and some things are doomed from the start. Attack on Titan, for example, requires scale of monetary input to make it look right that the Japanese live action film industry just doesn't operate within.

That said, the US companies looking to adapt anime should look longer at the history of what works and what doesn't and make choices accordingly. The two most recent high-profile flops: the US Death Note film (which is different from the much more highly regarded series of Japanese films) and Ghost in the Shell were obviously doomed. Trying to cram an entire Death Note plot from start to finish into 90 minutes was never going to work, nor was trying to turn an extremely high-concept science fiction film into a conventional action movie about the evils of corporatism. That's why I wouldn't expect anything from a Netflix Cowboy Bebop, it's the wrong sort of series to adapt. It's high-concept, genre-hopping, and has been elevated over time by the fans to godlike status. It has 'bad idea' written all over it.

[Lethologica]

The last (possibly only) US adaptation that went well was Edge of Tomorrow. Of course, it's basically unrecognizable. And it's arguable whether it should count given that the primary property is the light novel, not the manga.

[Metahuman1]

I don't quite understand that point of view. Would you want [favorite author] to stop writing after [favorite book]? Just because something is great, adding more (possibly) good things doesn't make it worse. Or if it does, then you can ignore it. But just adding to a good thing..?

Emphasis Mine.



That, that is seldom if ever how fandom works. That is seldom if ever how it's worked in the last 10-20 or so years at a conservative estimate.

And it's increasingly rarely how either canon's or studio productions work.

[Kato]

I would venture to say that the live action adaptation of Death Note was not great.

Perhaps it could have been worse, but it is missing a great deal of the soul from the anime.

I think Swine was talking about the much older Japanese adaptation, not the recent Netflix one. (unless you knew that and were criticising the old one, too)

Emphasis Mine.



That, that is seldom if ever how fandom works. That is seldom if ever how it's worked in the last 10-20 or so years at a conservative estimate.

And it's increasingly rarely how either canon's or studio productions work.

Because other people don't do it doesn't mean I can't.
I mean, I can't say I'm not a bit unhappy with e.g. DBE but I'm not that angry with the studio or least of all the actors that I'll hate anyone over it.

[Rodin]

The last (possibly only) US adaptation that went well was Edge of Tomorrow. Of course, it's basically unrecognizable. And it's arguable whether it should count given that the primary property is the light novel, not the manga.

I think a big part of it is that they've got two things working against them - change of format and change of culture.

We see the problem of change in format with comic book movies - the vast majority of superhero films over the years have been some degree of awful, and even the good ones have had issues. Pulling from manga is essentially the same thing. Pulling from literature has generally had better success, mainly because the filmmaker has a lot more freedom in adapting the story to fit the screen.

Then you have the culture problems. There are very few remakes of Japanese movies that match the original - The Magnificent Seven comes to mind, as does The Departed. The rest tend to be viewed unfavorably in comparison - The Ring, The Grudge, Shall We Dance, etc.

Shall We Dance is actually the perfect example - the fact that it's about English ballroom dancing IN JAPAN is a huge deal for the plot, and trying to translate the cultural stigma to America just does not work. Fun side note: Apparently there's another remake of a Japanese film called Hachi (about Hachiko, I assume), which also stars Richard Gere. I guess he's a Japanese film buff?

Anyway, I would say that it's not impossible to make a good adaptation from an anime. It's just really, really hard. At least it's a TV series this time, so they aren't adding the "film remakes of TV shows always suck" history on top of everything else.

[Legato Endless]

Elegantly adapting something from another culture takes sensitivity and expertise. Kurosawa's Shakespearean adaptions being the first to come to mind for Japan taking an English story and rendering it in a local context.

The real issue I think is math and power dynamics. Wikipedia's listing of American remakes of Japanese films numbers a scat 20, so it wouldn't be surprising there wouldn't be quality. A successful large film is something of a minor feat every time one manages to bring the thousands of disparate elements required together and into the right blend.

Combined with the fact that American cinema tends more toward clumsily pillaging foreign cultural ideas than wholesale adaptions it's not surprising we don't see much success here. That thoughtlessness is certainly surmountable, it's just disfavored by an enduring cultural context.

In a sense one could see why Cowboy Bebop might seem logical from a cultural perspective. The huge amount of Western storytelling aesthetics embedded into the work might make it seem like it'd translate easily, barring the Yakuza origin story, and even that is relatively minor in the runtime and organized crime stories can cross cultures with relative impunity. The format on the other hand is something of a death knell.

Of the live action adaptions of anime I've seen, the only successful ones were pretty conventional films you wouldn't necessarily know were manga/anime adaptions.

[t209]

http://splashreport.com/cowboy-bebop-story-details/
Good news: Christopher Yost will bet the writer, at least the first episode.
Bad news: Maybe poor attempt at being topical and going for more "exotic" gadgets rather than mundane (relatively).