"See You, Space Samurai"

I have to admit--when it comes to anime, Shinichiro Wantanabe has an unerring sense of cool. He's the guy who did some work on Macross Plus, Cowboy Bebop, a couple of the episodes on the Animatrix, and Samurai Champloo. For the purpose of this analysis, we're concerned with Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo.

Cowboy Bebop is one of the best animes of the past decade or so, hands-down. In terms of art, style, characters, and stories, it's top-notch. To sum, it's the story of a small band of bounty hunters who roam the galaxy looking for big bounties and a place to fit in. Generally, they don't find either one. Samurai Champloo, Wantanabe's most recent work (only the first volume of it has been officially released here in the US), concerns itself with two vagabond samurai in feudal Japan and the young woman who has asked their help in finding a samurai who "smells of sunflowers." The characters have no affection or connection to each other, they are simply thrust into one another's company by chance and happenstance.

The two series have this in common--the main characters are roamers, people without a home or a community, and they exist outside of societal norms. This seems to be a recurring theme with Wantanabe's work--characters who exist on the fringes, who don't belong. These are sympathetic characters only because they are the main characters. Were they secondary characters that we didn't invest a lot of time and plot in, we'd probably not care two bits for them. But since we grow attached to them, we feel bad for Spike when the Syndicate catches up with him. We feel Faye's pain when she realizes her past, even as she reclaims it, is gone forever and can never be truly recaptured. These characters roam around, searching for a place to belong, and they never find it. At one point in Cowboy Bebop, Faye even articulates this idea when she tells Ed that having a place to belong is the best feeling in the world. It's what drives the crew of the Bebop together--the need to belong, even if it's to a collective as eclectic and diverse as the group of bounty hunters.

Samurai Champloo is a little more difficult to parse out yet. The two main male characters, Mugen and Jin, seem to hate each other, and they'll attack one another at a moment's notice. But they are bound up by their predicament--fomented by Fuu, the female character who brings them all together in the first place--and perhaps enjoy the company of another human being who walks a similar path, even if they are polar opposites when it comes to personality.

Additionally, none of the characters in either anime seem to have what the Russians call sobornost--a sense of organic or communal togetherness. In Russian literature, those characters who possess sobornost thrive and achieve their goals, survive the end of the book, and prosper beyond their initial position. Those without fall, fail, and usually end up throwing themselves under a train or something similar.

Wantanabe seems fascinated with the ideas of people who live on the edges, beyond the norms. Spike and Faye from Cowboy Bebop are the prime examples. Spike sees everything that happens around him as a dream that he can't wake up from; he has been dead ever since he left his community in the Syndicate. Faye is literally without a past, an amnesiac with a sizeable debt due to medical bills for operations she never knew she had or had the chance to say yes or no to. These two characters especially of the Bebop are people without ties, or people who have chosen to cut their ties to the past for whatever reasons. But their communities keep coming back to haunt them--Spike keeps getting involved in affairs of the Syndicate through his former protege, the aptly named Vicious, and an old flame, Julia. His inability to let go of the community he was once a part of--a community which crumbled when he left it--eventually leads to his death. Faye receives a videotape from her childhood that reawakens her sense of who she was and where she came from, only to discover that where she came from has been more thoroughly obliterated than her memory ever was. When she regains her memory, she realizes she has lost her community, and the only one she has to hang on to now--the crew of the Bebop--is coming apart at the seams, partly because she herself never admitted that she needed the community.

The characters in both series seem to desperately want a community to belong to, desperately want a peer group. They sort of find one in each others' company, but it is a tentative connection at best, torn apart easily. These are true loners, people who cannot exist in normal society for whatever reason. Their ability to interact has been stunted through various trials and tribulations, and as a result they are incapable of fully understanding what it is they crave or how to achieve it. These characters are, in a sense, very tragic for the same reason that they are hip--they seem to need no one, no thing; they are solitary, existing beyond the law, beyond right and wrong; they appear as though they have all the answers and are unflappably cool. But there is desire and need buring below the surface, and most of the characters never seem to admit to the existence of this desire, and thus they are undone.

All in all, the characters in both Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo are exceptionally complex, tragic portraits of hipsters who attempt to deny their needs and live outside of the borders of society. In a way, they succeed, but they also fail utterly as human beings.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Soul Coughing, "Casiotone Nation"