>“I knew we were treading on hallowed ground,” said Nemec during a recent video call. “Spike, Jet, Faye, Vicious, Julia — they’re such delicious characters in the anime. … This felt like a great opportunity to mine their stories and to answer some of the things that I felt in the poetry that was the anime. To dig into a deeper narrative in places for these characters.”
>For Nemec and his team “it was always about honoring the spirit of the anime,” but that does not mean the live-action “Cowboy Bebop” series simply repeats the story told in the original.
>Instead, the 10-episode adaptation blends spot-on callbacks of moments from the anime with both subtle and substantial narrative changes — most noticeably around the show’s women, Faye and Julia (Elena Satine) — that allow the series to stand on its own.
>Debuting in 1998, the original “Cowboy Bebop” is a seminal anime often credited with helping expand the scope and reach of Japanese animation with its memorable characters, deep themes and genre-bending storytelling. But as influential as the series may be, it is a product of its time, so certain portrayals, including Faye and Julia’s, were ripe for updates.
>Still, “anything that you choose to try to do differently from an original beloved piece of IP, there is a lot of terror and night sweats and sleepless nights involved,” said executive producer Becky Clements of Tomorrow Studios.
>In the anime, Faye is a brash and skilled bounty hunter searching for her past. She has no memory of her life prior to the 50 years she spent cryogenically frozen, and for the most part, this backstory remains intact in the new adaptation.
>For Nemec and the writers, the first step in plotting Faye’s arc was figuring out “what it is about Faye [in the anime] that we love about Faye.”
>“To me it’s that she has the soul of a survivor,” said Nemec. “She’s scrappy, she’s wily, she’s quick, she’s vulnerable. She’s a survivor. She’s chasing her own history and her own past, and while it burdens her, it doesn’t stop her.”
>He explained that the adjustments to Faye’s story were made so she not only felt as empowered as she did in the anime, but also so that empowerment developed into greater agency.
God I fucking hate them