Animation
I argue with the help of a voluminous amount of scenes along with some heavy analysis, it does exactly the opposite. Shinichirō Watanabe, the creator of Cowboy Bebop and owner of the property, has ample evidence of a deeper meaning in which he uses visual symbolisms, and cues, recurring themes throughout the film.
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If their was a film worth talking about in the early 2000s, the one that should would be Cowboy Bebop the movie. Before the film is expound upon, some unknown by most history should be exclaimed. As the story itself takes place in 2072, the future where space travel is possible and impossible fanatical technologies are created and used without thought, the inception goes way back to 1942, in Harlem New York at a nightclub named “Minton’s Play House”, where musical artists battle each other with the most calm, soothing, coolest, loudest, most schway genre in music, jazz. The bands would group up and play in something called sessions, in which they would jam out and compete. Within these sessions are young men with a niche for jazz but an itch for freedom. Since the “Jazz Age” in the decade of the 1920s, jazz music has become conventional, and conformed to a formal form of music. In the eyes of the musicians, played out in a conventional sense and like their youth would naturally do, they begin to play more in hopes of creating a new genre while playing their souls out in an unorthodox manner of jazz.
A Genre on itself . . .
Besides the, what Jet see’s as inane activity by his piers, he in the in comes up with the same conclusion, accepting his situation and the bigger situation, whatever may be going on, usually life or death squabbles or a devious concocted plot by some Shakespearian’ tragedy like character, concerning the fate of the human race. As Jet’s noir feel could be interpreted as just a character bio that takes itself too seriously, if one could dive within his meaning behind the way he acts, looking deeper within the character’s reasoning for pausing in a detrimental issue that could potentially get his “friends”, some associates, and himself killed, see where the character historically and symbolically represents, the age of noir film in the very age that inspired the style, the 1940s. Some films in specific are Kiss Me Deadly in 1955, The Asphalt Jungle 1950, references to Jet’s shrouded backstory involving but what else noir tropes in it’s films, a women, and Out of the Past in 1947. This is a recurring pattern throughout the film and is a theme strongly enforced by even the voice of Jet, which sounds like a New York like detective from a noir film. Looking at this character closer like space itself, reveals more when one delves into it.
A new age . . .
“ Are we in you living in the real world?”, implying a viewer would linger in thought on the actuality of what happened and the the real meaning behind the phrase. Both scenes cross because they attempt to give the same meaning and give off the same theme. Faye is the ignorant receiver, representing the audience, hence the first person perspective, entering a dream and not knowing. The dreamer who does not know that their in a dream. Spike from past scenes knows the effects of the compound and, knows what it admits, so he react more calmly while under the influence of the virus. He represents the dreamer lucid in his slumber, knowing he is a dreamer in a dream. As this theme runs laces through the show connecting both, the question comes to why is Spike calm, and Faye more frantic?
And it will be called . . .
“The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called... “COWBOY BEBOP””. The backstory for the movie/ show within itself dives into a deep rabbit’s hole of thought and in depth the medium takes on. Watching without context, although maybe very riveting, it retains more meaning than what it may appear to be. Watching a group of people doing what they do, how they want to do it is a concept throughout the anime, not just a recurring event. An example would be in Cowboy Bebop the movie, where character Jet is left alone while everyone he works with is completing a job, a bounty, while he is left to wonder and reflect upon the decisions he has made and people he has let in his life such as the Bebop crew, to leave him in what he sees sarcastically as a pathetic state.
. . . The Bebop . . .
Spike nodding off the fact the siege knew he had dreams of the series of events that lead him to where he is, he proceeds to exclaim he is like a drifter, who wandered in between the lines of reality and the unknown, paraphrasing of course, and the chief retorts that this world looks the big blue mass and that there is an eye of truth. The big blue mass is hassy, and not clear, but if it’d look through the eye of truth then the water will still and become clear. This is the where it’d go is it not plain as day, is it not obvious, and clear like the waters, but no. The scene is meant to exclaim that our as a people have individual thought and therefore have independent perceptions. Faye more frantic because the ideas may excite and be riveting or as later she collapses, terrifying and too new and out there, or by contrast Spike’s reaction of calm or unimpressed, you don’t have to like what is presented to you. It screams the truth of Cinema, it is all about individual thought and perceptions, that's what makes it endlessly entertaining and unique.
See ya space cowboy . . .