“Cowboy Bebop”, the stratospheric anime that Netflix would have wanted to match

While it has just been adapted into a live series by the streaming giant, with more than mixed success, this space opera remains a peak of Japanese animation. It is again visible on the platform.

From the first second of its cult credits, he proclaims himself an anime of “a new kind”. Twenty years after its first French broadcasts (on Canal + in 2000, then on Game One), Cowboy Bebop has not aged a bit: poseur, but keeping his promises. And remains one of the very best Japanese animated series. Its adaptation in live action (with real shots) just arrived on Netflix, where she joins there the original, whose magic was probably impossible to recreate. Cool as hell, this space opera staple comes close to the perfect anime. It is not too late to discover the wanderings of Spike, Jet, Faye and Ed, and their adventures of great wealth.

Designed at the very end of the last century, in the middle of a Japanese creative black hole after the tornado Evangelion, Cowboy Bebop has reshuffled the cards of a particularly mercantile industry, and contributed to the influence of serial Japanese animation, especially in the United States. Its director, Shin’ichirô Watanabe, was instructed to build a universe that could sell models of spaceships … Never mind, he put in place twenty-six mature, complex, violent episodes, features subversives which earned him several censures before being able to go to the end of his story. That of three bounty hunters, a crazy little girl and a corgi who, in 2071, roam the space in search of adventure, but also of identity, according to stories, young and old.