rethink

Lady Strange

Lately, I found myself revisiting the anime Cowboy Bebop. It isn't really the slice-of-life anime I'm following this autumn/winter season as Cowboy Bebop was broadcast some time ago. No, Cowboy Bebop speaks to me because it seems to explore the themes of what it means to run away from ourselves.

We tend to run away from things that frighten us or things that make us feel bloody awful. What if the thing that frightened us was ourselves? What if the thing we were running away from is us? I have had the thought of running away from myself when I was younger. I was making myself feel very awful, and I was frightened by what I was capable of doing. I will not tell you what it is I did - but I did want to run away from myself. There was of course madness to run into, but that did not appeal to me. So, I ran away from my 'bad gothic lass' self into this 'prim victorian' self you see now. Of course, the irony is that, the past catches up with one, and soon one has to reconcile the past with the present. And that's one of the themes of Cowboy Bebop.

Each of the characters from Spike, to Faye, to Ed - they are all running away from their past and themselves. Yet, a part of that past that was so frightening to them still lives in them, and it peeks out every now and then when they are forced into a corner and cannot be anything but that terrifying thing. Yet in that terrifying aspect of themselves, they are good sorts who care about justice for others, and all the noble things like affection amongst friends, repaying debts, and valuing life.

These drifters come together in the anime and they help each other grow. And as their past catches up with them, they deal with it, and try to reconcile their past with their present, and in so doing, they help each other out. The friendship between them is most touching. Even though everyone is acerbically making jibes at everyone else, they really care enough to bail each other out of trouble when the person whose past is catching up decides to leave and settle things.

These two themes of friends willing to accept the past and present in one, and who are willing to cry for one, as well as the whole aspect of running away from onself to be numb from any feeling and never quite succeeding fully is very apparent in the closing song entitled "Real Folk Blues".

The song is in Japanese, and I have uploaded it on sendspace, here http://www.sendspace.com/file/uv9pys

The lyrics address the themes mentioned above and here's the translation:

It's too late to cry I love you.
The wind still blowing, my heart still aching
One side of my eyes see tomorrow,
And the other one see yesterday
I hope I could sleep in the cradle of your love, again
Cry for me, somebody, with dry eyes

The real folk blues
I just want to feel a real sorrow
It's not bad a life in the muddy river
If life is once

Hopeless hope, and the chance with traps
What is right, or wrong
It's like a both side of a coin
How long I must live till I release?

The real folk blues
I just want to feel a real pleasure
All that glitters is not gold

Amanda · Joined: 24 Oct 2007 Posts: 21

I'm going to say something cliche and probably very obnoxious to most people reading it- Asian anime (as in not American or... I dunno, French anime) tends to be much more sincere than pretty much anything we get on tv *disclaimer- I haven't watched tv in over a year, so maybe something really fabulous and insightful is on now*

This is not to say that all of it is good, it certainly is not, or that all of it is "deep", only that it is much more likely to carry strong emotional themes, and many of the ambiguities and confusion in life than even an American drama. I guess a profit motive has a lot to do with this, and possibly the absurdity of most anime- in the art style, in the caricaturization (made up word, I suppose) of situations, and the fact that it is a cartoon may make it easier to include the substance that is so "scary".