So What if yoko kanno is Involved?

Tuesday night is one of my free times where I usually write some friendly and kind manga posts that will appear on Thursdays. Last week, I completed this first soft and short manga about two young adults falling in love with each other despite their families expectations and deciding to leave home to be free and live for themselves. It’s called Haru’s Curse and it’s really good. I might write about it next week. For today, my mind has been a lot more focused on this announcement of Yoko Kanno working on the soundtrack of the live action Cowboy Bebop Netflix show. It sounds exciting at first but after a while, it’s a major “eh” and raises questionable flags for me which is strange considering how I think about Yoko Kanno in general. You know, with unlimited praise.

So who is Yoko Kanno? Well, only one of the most prolific people behind a lot of anime soundtracks. Do you know Escaflowne, Turn A Gundam, Rahxephon, Macross Plus and Frontier, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Terror in Resonance, and so many other things. It is no accident that some of my favorite anime have her behind their soundtracks is what I am saying here. Each of the soundtracks she has created is so unique and belongs to each show because of their different styles and genres associated to each of them. She works hard and studies music from all over the world to put into these shows and it shows how dedicated she is to the craft of music.

All of that leads to the question of why this news bothers me. Well, at this moment I don’t really know the quality of the Cowboy Bebop live action show so I can’t say anything against it. That’s why I haven’t written anything about it or the Gundam live action thing before or recently besides not being one of those people who automatically thinks its going to suck because its live action anime adaptation. It could be good because we don’t know what the show is going for yet. Also, if its just doing what the anime series did but live action and worse, then I can just open up the blu-ray case I have and watch the show again. There, done. Until that show happens to appear, which can work considering that live action sci fi shows like it have existed before already, I really don’t have anything against it right not at all.

Regardless though, the news behind Yoko Kanno being apart of this thing is a little concerning to me. Especially since it feels a little too clickbaity and was planted right now for obvious reasons. I do love Yoko Kanno, as I have already established and will establish and shout this in the outside world if it wasn’t weird, but the shooting is already done? It feels so tacked on after the fact because the shooting was done two months ago. Immediately, it feels like there is no sense of cohesion behind what the show is doing versus what her music is going to do especially if the show is going to be out in the fall this year. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be bad at all because Yoko Kanno could put in 1/8th of her passion and effort in any soundtrack she creates and it will be fantastic. I just…something feels wrong here and I just can’t help but be a little….it’s hard to put into words. Even if she was working on the music before hand, that doesn’t change my opinion about this decision.

There is something about how a person can throw out a name of a famous and fabulous actor or any really good person in a news article or something else about a film or television series and count it as fantastic. In this case, I don’t think that the presence or name of Yoko Kanno being added to the Live Action Television Series really benefits it at all. In fact, it makes people compare the two even more before the television shows appears and that means that expectations can be too high by general masses just because she’s involved. Or you know, those edgy people who will dump on the show and say its horrible when it appears. One thing I hoped would happen is they give another person or a lot of people that audiences don’t know about to express themselves and try something unique with the series then what we are given. I say this despite being hungry for more Yoko Kanno soundtracks ever since her last one with Terror in Resonance in 2014.

Yoko Kanno doesn’t have to be the only creative music talent associated to Cowboy Bebop. If anything, the soul of Cowboy Bebop, besides the Bebop crew concerning themselves with their futures when their pasts weighs them down, is the experimental nature of the show and the different sorts of genres it wants to explore and think about. This is the show where the cast is high on mushrooms in one episode and fighting a clown that defies gravity in another one and yet it all feels like it belongs in one show. Tying Yoko Kanno down to be the only person behind Cowboy Bebop feels so anti Cowboy Bebop to me no matter how creative of a soundtrack she creates for this version. It feels so limited and boring to me because Cowboy Bebop is about anything other then that considering its episodic content.

So in a shorter amount of words, what I am saying is that I don’t like that the live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop is being weighed down by Yoko Kanno. It does not just have to do completely with the annoying “let’s make something that was animated into live action” phase that I despise, but it does play apart of it. It does not have to do with whether or not the show itself is going to suck maybe because there is a chance that it wont or attract more people into watching the anime series. It does not have everything to completely do with Yoko Kanno herself either because we know she’s good and doesn’t miss EVER. It has to do with the fact that her being involved doesn’t help with any of these things at all. I know that I just wrote a think piece about this and probably ranting into space for all I know, but I can’t help but feel annoyed is all. I just had to write something about this, sorry. Just an olderish anime fan having feelings.