‘Cowboy Bebop’, ‘Blade Runner’, and the Ouroboros of Affect

Welcome to The Queue — your day by day distraction of curated video content material sourced from throughout the online. Right this moment, we’re watching a video essay that explores the connections between Cowboy Bebop and the Blade Runner movies.

The cultural impression of Ridley Scott‘s 1982 movie Blade Runner can’t be overstated. It’s the gritty, cyberpunk daydream that launched 100 tech-noirs. An amalgam of pop-culture influences itself, Blade Runner‘s fingerprints are throughout sci-fi cinema: Brazil, Unusual Days, Darkish Metropolis, Ghost within the Shell, the checklist goes on and on. And but, one jazzy providing stands out among the many small-screen choices.

Launched on the daybreak of the brand new millennium, Cowboy Bebop merged the far-flung swashbuckling power of Area Westerns with a distinctly existential neo-noir tinge. Set within the now inside attain way forward for 2071, the present sees humanity solid out throughout the Photo voltaic System, reliant on bounty hunters (generally known as “Cowboys”) to trace down criminals and preserve some semblance of peace. Sequence director Shinichiro Watanabe has at all times worn his admiration for Blade Runner on his sleeve as a significant affect. As some extent of reality, this all got here full circle when Watanabe directed a 15-minute animated brief movie Blade Runner Black Out 2022 in 2017, a part of a sequence of shorts linking Scott’s unique to Denis Villeneuve‘s impending sequel, Blade Runner 2049.

Because the video essay under elegantly suggests, each Cowboy Bebop and Villeneuve’s movie have an awesome deal in frequent, from superficial similarities and synchronicities to deeper musculature that verges on poetic likeness: “not homage, however a shared soul.” Certainly, each the movie and the anime sequence have an particularly crunchy relationship with their forebearer; greater than only a footnote, they’re each explicitly involved in existential issues corresponding to legacy, objective, and the fuzzy intersections in between.

(Additionally, Cowboy Bebop followers, as when you wanted extra of a cause to take a look at the video under, Steve Blum himself — the English voice of Spike Spiegel — makes an look reciting Roy Batty’s “Tears within the Rain” monologue. Goals do come true!)

Watch “Cowboy Bebop x Blade Runner – Cycle of Affect (feat. Spike)”:

Who made this?

This video essay on the connections between the anime Cowboy Bebop and the Blade Runner movies is by okayaptainkristian, a YouTube-based video essay channel that peddles in visible love letters to filmmakers, musicians, and syndicated cartoons. The account is run by Kristian T. Williams, whom you possibly can observe on Twitter here. You may subscribe to kaptainkristian, and take a look at their again catalog on YouTube right here.

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Associated Subjects: Blade Runner 2049, Cowboy Bebop, The Queue

Meg Shields is the standard farm boy of your goals and a senior contributor at Movie College Rejects. She at the moment runs three columns at FSR: The Queue, How’d They Do That?, and Horrorscope. She can also be a curator for One Excellent Shot and a contract author for rent. Meg could be discovered screaming about John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’ on Twitter right here: @TheWorstNun. (She/Her).