First of all, I’m not used to watching movies in English but this one was quite enjoyable, especially since Steve Blum (one of my favorite voice actors) does the main character, Spike’s, voice. I must say throuroughly enjoyed Cowboy Bebop, more than I thought. At first when I heard of it in my younger years, I turned down watching it because I wasn’t a big Mecha fan. To my surprise, it wasn’t that Mecha-ee after all. I wanted to mention that after seeing a few animes, the lone, incredibly skilled fighter that spike portrays is seen throughout quite a few series. The major one that sticks out to me is Samurai Champloo. It’s pretty funny considering the same voice actor does the voice of Mugen in that series (the one who exhibits the “spike” characteristics). They also resemble each other just a bit.
Anyways…the film really caught my attention because of the magnificent artwork (I’m a sucker for it). Portraying the city and environments they were in so well; leaving hidden messages in the backgrounds of some scenes, or simply inklings to piece together previous ideas. From the scene when Spike follows Dashin around the foreign bazaar, the scenes go by fast but you get such a great sense of the change of atmosphere so to speak. They show glimpses of people sitting around just enjoying the day, a constant flow of people moving in every direction on the main roads, a kind of sense of trust between people seeing as there were shop owners just sleeping in the back leaving their stands with merchandise unattended and out in the open. Enough of my blabber about that, I wanted to mention the view of Purgatory from the perspective of the main antagonist, a former special ops soldier and an unfortunate experimental guinea pig, Vincent.
To go on a tangent real quick, for those fans of bleach, he reminded me (looks-wise and somewhat personality wise) of old man Zangetsu from Bleach.
It was really hard to make out if Vincent was actually an enemy throughout this entire film. He was only doing what he thought was best for the world as a whole seeing as he was denied his regular life and passageway into the afterlife thanks to the corrupt government responsible for the testing. It was quite depressing to see what Vincent had to go through. He had to feign his death to avoid being hunted by government officials, witness all of his comrades perish on a lonely planet, lose all memory of his past and worst of all, lose the memory of his beloved which seemed to mean more to him than anything else. I completely see where he stands after going through all of that. In a different light, he was just trying to be a hero and save everyone from possibly being denied that passageway into the much-desired afterlife, a heaven type place. Vincent’s view in my prospective was that the life we live on earth is purgatory and we are all born to suffer sadly, I once had the same view (although without the motive to kill people to help the process). Based on our decisions we make in this stage, we can either ruin our future after death by doing bad deeds or live in eternal happiness by living as a respectable human being doing good deeds. Vincent simply wanted to rush the process and end the suffering of all the individuals on earth and grant them happiness in the passageway to the afterlife.
Before I go on and write too much…Overall, I really enjoyed the movie and recommend it to anyone out there, anime fan or not. It had a nice message, beautiful visuals, incredible jazz music and memorable characters.
You make some good points about this movie and I agree with them very much. I did enjoy the city and the artwork in the movie very much. It made me feel as if it was taking place in a real world today, even though it was taking place on mars. Anyhow, the main thing I enjoyed most about your blog on the movie was your analysis of Vincent. I agree with you one hundred percent that he was not the bad guy that he originally seems to be. Once you realize that the reason he is doing this is so that everyone else can see these beautiful butterflies and experience this beautiful dream that he can no longer experience, you can tell that he isn’t that bad of a guy. He just seems to be misguided. You also touched on the fact that this is another movie where the government shows corruption like the other movies are saying about Japan. Interestingly enough, this is the one time I did not mention it in my blog, but I do agree because they were experimenting on people, making them invincible to this disease (Vincent), which in the end, drove them mad. What is with the government in these movies? lol
ReplyDeletebtw: I am so making that quote my facebook status.