Cowboy Bebop: The Movie

An exercise in style, mostly. I haven't watched the series, but given that the characters are just collections of archetypes, it's very easy to catch up and get into the swing of things. The animation is brilliant – particularly in its use of distorted perspective and skewed framing. And the music choices are inspired – a selection of jazz and funk tracks that bring the science fiction setting down to earth, and highlight the debts owed to hard-boiled noir. The characters are all flamboyantly-dressed Tarantino-esque smart-mouths (although the film does tend to disrobe the women to telegraph their vulnerability).

Piecing together what the film is about is an unhappy task. There is something to its notion that being free from the fear of death is the source of true liberty. It also seems to be the source of the main character's exhilarating martial arts and piloting abilities. An almost Buddhist renunciation of worldly attachments is married to the rugged individualism of the wild west.

The villain is the victim of a corporate conspiracy, who wants to share the pain he has been put through by releasing a chemical weapon in the middle of a city parade (parallels with the Sarin attacks in Tokyo are left unexplored). As is typical in anime, the corporation does not get its comeuppance at the end (in contrast to the new Ghost in the Shell film, for example). Instead the only way out is suicide, of a sort. The filmmakers link this death drive to a sense of the numinous and transcendent, and end by asking the audience if they can tell what's real and what's make believe. The villain and hero are mirror images of each other, and the film may be warning the audience away from the alluring but nihilistic aesthetic they embody.

Ghost in the Shell

The LGNN discussion (which I contributed to at the margins) did a good job of exploring the whitewashing controversy. Perversely, it made me want to watch the film more, to get a sense of exactly how it dealt with the idea of Scarlett Johansson playing a Japanese woman. Turns out that you can excuse that decision in the same way that you might excuse the gratuitous nudity in the manga and anime – the Major is designed by a heartless corporation according to its (patriarchal, white supremacist) whims.

There's a strange auto-criticism in so blatantly placing a Japanese ghost in a white American shell, given that it is done at the behest of the villains of the film. The evil corporation kidnap Mokoto Kusanagi (a rebellious teen) and wipe her memories, and I find it impossible to tell whether this is a sly nod to how Dreamworks and the filmmakers have treated the original property. Not least because the CEO who is responsible for the nefarious plot is dispatched in fine style by none other than 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano, an acclaimed Japanese comedian, actor and film director in his own right. You could read it as the return of the repressed, or the revenge of the colonised on their imperial masters.

The film is at its least interesting when it indulges in shot-for-shot recreations of the anime (which I love). The rather generous Observer review is on point in so far as it identifies the sordid world as the main distinguishing feature of the remake. In the (unspecified) city of the future, giant holograms tower over buildings advertising brands both real and imaginary, adding their own sinister comment on the film's mercenary nature.