I don’t often get time to watch anime anymore. Between grad school and work, my time is pretty much spoken for. And anime is by definition time-consuming. A story that expands over twenty-six episodes? Textbook time-consuming.
So tonight, watching Cowboy Bebop, unfolding myself in the hour it took to watch two episodes, I found myself unwinding in the same way the story does. This might be my favorite anime, ever. Between the washed out colors and simple art style and the way the stories always seem soft-spoken, as muted as the colors, there’s just something about it that invites relaxation.
And while Bebop may not seem to have a story on the surface, there is definitely a story that unfolds overtime. But that’s not where the focus lies. Instead, the focus is primarily on the characters. And if the colors are downplayed, if the explosions are less frequent, if the tone of the series is muted, then the characters more than make up for it. They’re not larger than life. They’re lifelike. They’re believable characters. Sure, there are those random moments of awkward dialogue, but that’s more a problem of translation than anything else.
All of that plays perfectly into my style of storytelling; it’s the reason I like Delillo and Faulkner, the reason why Light in August was on the groom’s cake at my wedding. I like the expansive stories. Which is awkward, being a writer primarily of short stories at the moment (again, grad school limitations). There’s something to learn from classic anime like Bebop (and there are some modern anime that follow the same pattern) and it’s the same lesson we learn from those expansive works like Faulkner and Dellillo and to a lesser extent Chabon and Franzen. Stories don’t have to be all flash and explosions. I love a good Jonathan Lethem novel, but the best stories are those that don’t rely on spectacle. Sure, I fall into the trap of spectacle in my own writing, and it works sometimes, but there’s something to be said for understatement, whether that means not having a kangaroo in the bathtub, or focusing on human characters in what has typically been viewed as an action-heavy, plot-centric medium.
Elizabeth Bishop taught me to linger on those great moments when writing poetry. Apparently Cowboy Bebop is teaching me the same thing in fiction.
