What’s Lost When a Classic Anime Is Adapted by Netflix
The charm of the original <em>Cowboy Bebop</em>—and many other Japanese animated series—is not just in its style but in its storytelling.
For decades, Hollywood has struggled to adapt anime, a type of Japanese animation. The genre has a distinct visual style—lush backgrounds, sleek camera movement, exaggerated facial expressions—that looks uncanny with live actors. And the storytelling, which tends to dramatize a character’s gradual change, doesn’t always fit into the usual conflict-driven Hollywood plot structures. Anime has a huge American fan base, and it has inspired the signature aesthetics of filmmakers such as the Wachowskis. But American attempts to capture its essence and have mostly yielded critical and box-office failures.
