Blu-Ray Bebop
Mar. 10th, 2026 05:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
setsuledWatanabe Shinichiro in The Criterion Closet to-day. He's the director of the original Cowboy Bebop, an anime series that's not widely known in Japan, at least not in my experience living here. I had one student a few years ago who was a fan. He was one of those students whom I wish I could have done more, for whom I wish I could have been a better, more insightful teacher. The fact that he was a Cowboy Bebop fan is enough to show how relatively isolated he was.
Watanabe's picks aren't so surprising. Maybe the Jacques Tati box set is most surprising but Watanabe's work does sometimes have the detached, deadpan quality of Tati's comedy. I didn't expect him to pick Suzuki Seijun's Branded to Kill as the only Japanese film among his choices but if I'd thought about it beforehand I probably would've predicted it. It's a stylish, postmodern gangster film, which is basically what Cowboy Bebop is. I have not met one person in Japan who's told me they've heard of Suzuki Seijun, by the way.
It's funny how the trailer promotes the film as "humanity laid bare" over a clip of one of its most absurd scenes, of a gangster dancing hysterically while under a hail of bullets. Branded to Kill is one of Suzuki's most detached, most ironic films. It's closer to some of Watanabe's post-Cowboy Bebop work than it is to Cowboy Bebop which, though it is postmodern, has warmth to it, a kind of warmth that almost seems to come through accidentally through the characters' chemistry. More like Tati, I guess.
