Poll: Shinichiro Watanabe's Anime?

[Soviet Heavy]

Perhaps not the greatest anime director, but definitely one of the most well known and well received, I find it hard to find something that Watanabe has produced that I've disliked. Sure, some of his individual episodes can be stinkers, but the guy has got one hell of a solid track record. But what is his best work?

I'll admit that I lean more towards his older stuff, seeing as I've watched his first three works a hell of a lot more than Space Dandy or Kids on the Slope (which I haven't finished). Of these, I'm sort of torn between Macross Plus and Bebop. Samurai Champloo is great, don't get me wrong, but it's overarching story isn't that strong, and it meanders about a little too much.

Macross Plus is one long story, basically Top Gun meets space opera. Meanwhile, Bebop is a series of vignettes that don't really follow each other except when the show calls for it. Bebop also has the superior dub (not to slight Cranston's surprisingly good turn as Isamu Dyson). It's hard to choose between the two, but if I really had to, I'd have to go with Bebop. I like the music better, I love the multicultural angle, and I like westerns. I also love Top Gun and airplanes, so don't take this as me saying Macross Plus is somehow worse, because it really isn't.

If I had to pick a favorite Bebop story, I think I'd go with Ganymede Elegy, or Knocking on Heaven's Door (The Movie). Tthe first is a great Jet episode, while the second has got some killer animation and attention to detail. It can plod along at times, but it is just beautiful to watch, so I don't mind. And it has airplanes.

Now go and do the writing thing.

 

[Daystar Clarion]

I was surprised by how much I really liked Space Dandy.

Bebop will always be my favourite, and Champloo is a fun adventure, but Space Dandy was just so charming, and ridiculous, I couldn't help but love it.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Definitely Cowboy Bebop for me followed second place by Samurai Champloo. I haven't seen Macross Plus and Kid on the slope and I ain't a fan of Space Dandy.

 

[twistedmic]

Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo are more or less tied for first place and Space Dandy comes in at a close second.

 

[Soviet Heavy]

Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo are more or less tied for first place and Space Dandy comes in at a close second.

I'm trying to pin down why I feel Samurai Champloo isn't quite as good in my mind. Its dub isn't as good (Steve Blum is still decent, but Kirk Thornton was just a little *too* stiff as Jin), and the animation is a lot more inconsistent. When its good, its great, but it has that bad habit of making side characters nearly featureless or incredibly ugly. It also felt a little more formulaic. Fuu gets captured, Jin remains stoic, and Mugen punches someone. The episodes that shook up the status quo were my favorite, or ones that focused on an individual character. The two parter dealing with Mugen's past was great, with one hell of a cruel ending.

I think the biggest problem was the main storyline. Cowboy Bebop didn't really have a main story. Spike and Vicious's rivalry didn't drive the plot, but it showed up a few times. Champloo's quest for the Sunflower Samurai kept getting side tracked, and the one shot episodes, while fun, I felt could have been better used to build up Fuu's past. We only find out that she was secretly a christian in the last episode, while I think the episode with the fake Francis Xavier would have been a better place to reveal that.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I've only seen Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Shamploo (what should I pick up next?) and between those two Bebop wins by a landslide. Bebop may have not appeared to have an overarching story, except it did: it was about a group of extremely dissimilar people - ex-cops and ex-criminals alike - trying to run away from a past that kept catching up to them. They were all betrayed and traumatized, and each character had a very distinct way of dealing with the trauma throughout the series before coming full circle by the finale.

Samurai Shamploo made the mistake of presenting a premise for a plot that went on to be largely ignored, but more glaringly, it withheld the main character's motivation that was supposed to drive the action. We don't know why Fuu wants to find the Sunflower Samurai, and as a result I for one couldn't invest myself emotionally on their adventures. They could be funny, dark, interesting, sad, but in the end it was all meaningless to me. You can't have a protagonist whose motivations are unclear. Even if they're reversed by the end, you need something to hold on to in the meantime. Otherwise why should I care if I don't know exactly what's at stake, or if there are any stakes at all? Fuu's quest seemed as spontaneous as it felt inconsequential. The fact that Mugen & Jin don't have the slightest interest on what they're doing or what they're doing it for didn't help either. As a result the series - as funny, somber and entertaining as it could be - felt weak and flimsy. The whole series felt constructed (or should I say improvised) around a surprise ending that didn't feel all that surprising and quite anticlimactic as a result.

On an unrelated note, has anybody counted the number of times the series abuses the "character falls to what appears to be certain death until he or she shows up later" trope? What a cheap way to amp the drama. I stopped caring after Jin or Mugen fell for like the fourth time towards his "death".

 

[dyre]

Of the ones I've seen at least part of (Bebop, Champloo, Space Dandy), Cowboy Bebop is the best. Hell, something like seven years after watching it, it's still the best anime I've ever seen, especially in terms of writing and style.

Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo are more or less tied for first place and Space Dandy comes in at a close second.

I'm trying to pin down why I feel Samurai Champloo isn't quite as good in my mind. Its dub isn't as good (Steve Blum is still decent, but Kirk Thornton was just a little *too* stiff as Jin), and the animation is a lot more inconsistent. When its good, its great, but it has that bad habit of making side characters nearly featureless or incredibly ugly. It also felt a little more formulaic. Fuu gets captured, Jin remains stoic, and Mugen punches someone. The episodes that shook up the status quo were my favorite, or ones that focused on an individual character. The two parter dealing with Mugen's past was great, with one hell of a cruel ending.

I think the biggest problem was the main storyline. Cowboy Bebop didn't really have a main story. Spike and Vicious's rivalry didn't drive the plot, but it showed up a few times. Champloo's quest for the Sunflower Samurai kept getting side tracked, and the one shot episodes, while fun, I felt could have been better used to build up Fuu's past. We only find out that she was secretly a christian in the last episode, while I think the episode with the fake Francis Xavier would have been a better place to reveal that.

I also felt that Cowboy Bebop was slightly (but noticeably) superior to Samurai Champloo.

For me, I felt that Bebop's storytelling was slightly more mature. Champloo gets a little too overt with its "the protagonists are nice, save-the-day heroes (especially Fuu)," while Bebop had a more noir-ish "the protagonists are unapologetically self-interested (like everyone else in the universe), but they do do the right thing when it counts."

 

[Soviet Heavy]

I've only seen Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Shamploo (what should I pick up next?) and between those two Bebop wins by a landslide. Bebop may have not appeared to have an overarching story, except it did: it was about a group of extremely dissimilar people - ex-cops and ex-criminals alike - trying to run away from a past that kept catching up to them. They were all betrayed and traumatized, and each character had a very distinct way of dealing with the trauma throughout the series before coming full circle by the finale.

I don't feel that's so much the *plot* of Bebop as it is the driving theme. I find Watanabe's recurring theme of confronting one's past was done the best in Bebop, mainly in the character of Faye.

Look at how each of Watanabe's leading women deal with their past betrayal/trauma. Fuu's abandonment by her father is what motivates her to find him, if only for revenge. Myung's attempted rape leads her into denial, which brings disaster about when her memory is uploaded into an unstable AI that cannot handle such denial.

Meanwhile, Faye was taken advantage of and conned out of her money by uncaring thieves. She responds by deflecting anything resembling intimacy, and hiding behind a veil of self absorbed arrogance. I find that the way Faye dealt with her past to be the most interesting of the three women. It certainly has a lot more layers than Fuu's "always do the right thing" attitude, or Myung's emotional wreck.

 

[diligentscribbler]

Bebop.

Kids on the Slope is probably the biggest let down I've had in a long time.

A talented director making an anime (the signature style of his country) set in japan's formative years post war about Jazz, America's first real culturally unique phenomenon and probably japan's first experience of Americana.

I thought, you know this could be amazing. A real delicate examination of how invasive american culture was in forming modern japan that for the first time was free from culture reclusivity. It sounds like a Murakami novel or a Ozu film, we could have got something so introspectively rich about the conflict between modernity and tradition in japan.

And he made it into a bullshit high-school drama with flat boring one note characters, I'm beginning to think Watanabe is a one trick pony.

 

[Casual Shinji]

He was a co-director on Macross Plus though. To me it's Koji Morimoto's genuis that really shines through in that movie.

But anyway, I'm not the biggest fan of Watanabe. I definitely respect the guy for his skills, but to me those skills are just all about style and "coolness" and not much else. So all of his work just kind of blends together for me. I haven't seen Kids on the Slope, but from everything that I have, Space Dandy got the most geniune responses from me. I hardly ever find that an anime's humor takes me by surprise and really has me laughing out loud...

Spoiler

The tragic past of the vendor taking the cake.

Champloo was just Bebop's run-off.

 

[Kolby Jack]

Champloo, if you couldn't tell. I like Bebop, but I dislike jazz music and I love a happy ending as long as it's earned. Champloo has a badass hip-hop soundtrack that meshes so well with the style of the series, AND it has a happy ending that the characters fucking EARNED THE SHIT OUT OF. Bebop didn't even HAVE an ending. That might appeal to some, but generally I like my self-contained series to have CLOSURE at the end.

Honestly I feel like most people who prefer Bebop do so because it's dark and it's cool to like dark things, or because they have an irrational hatred for hip-hop. Champloo was refreshing in that it never took itself too seriously, the overarching plot was loose until the very end allowing each episode to tell its own unique story, the characters all had troubled pasts but grew past them to find happiness, there was no lame sexual tension to be had, and it was friggin hip-hop in Edo-period Japan, yet it didn't feel out of place at all. Bebop is a great show, but I never really felt like it drew me in as much as Champloo.

 

[Julius Terrell]

For me it's probably macross plus. I wish I could understand why cowboy bebop is so popular on this board. I mean I enjoyed the series and the movie quite a bit, but I guess I just enjoyed Macross Plus more.

 

[Rellik San]

For me it's probably macross plus. I wish I could understand why cowboy bebop is so popular on this board. I mean I enjoyed the series and the movie quite a bit, but I guess I just enjoyed Macross Plus more.

Yeah I never understood the ravening popularity of Bebop either... especially when Outlaw star was a much better show. But I agree with you Macross Plus is til this day one of my all time favourite anime.

Although Shinichiro for me isn't even in the same league as the likes of Satoshi Kon, Shnichi Watanabe (that one confuses the hell outta people) and Mamoro Hosoda.

 

[Spikejet2736]

For me it's probably macross plus. I wish I could understand why cowboy bebop is so popular on this board. I mean I enjoyed the series and the movie quite a bit, but I guess I just enjoyed Macross Plus more.

Yeah I never understood the ravening popularity of Bebop either... especially when Outlaw star was a much better show.

No it's not like at all, Outlaw Star is like Cowboy Bebop's much younger immature cousin, it maybe fun as goofy mindless entertainment but it's not even in the same league as Cowboy Bebop.

 

[Spikejet2736]

For me it's probably macross plus. I wish I could understand why cowboy bebop is so popular on this board. I mean I enjoyed the series and the movie quite a bit, but I guess I just enjoyed Macross Plus more.

I love Macross Plus, too. I think what makes Bebop my favorite is that it's the best of both worlds from Watanabe. It's funny, stylish and action packed like Samurai Champloo but also has the subtle human drama and sci fi aspects of Macross Plus

 

[Spikejet2736]

Bebop didn't even HAVE an ending. That might appeal to some, but generally I like my self-contained series to have CLOSURE at the end.

[SPOILERS!] Spike's dead, I don't know how you get more closure than that