How Cowboy Bebop Broke The Anime Opening Mold
I love anime opening credits. The best of them distill the strongest qualities of their source material into beautiful, ninety-second chunks of music and animation. Even the worst of them churn up love in my heart. I remember almost nothing about "Nobunagun," but I have a special place in my heart for its outrageous hard-rock theme song "Respect for the Dead Man." The opening guitar riff of "Rewrite," Asian Kung-Fu Generation's theme for "Fullmetal Alchemist," brings back vivid memories of my teenage years. I know that I'm not alone on that, either. "A Cruel Angel's Thesis," the theme song to "Neon Genesis Evangelion," topped JOYSOUND's karaoke rankings for the Heisei period (1992-2019.) "Gurenge," the theme song to "Demon Slayer," has been downloaded over a million times and was even featured in Japan's recent Olympics Closing Ceremonies. The right Anisong can make a lot of money.
Anime opening credits are frequently over the top, just like the medium itself. Their often upbeat vocals, repeated visual motifs, and cost-cutting measures are ripe for parody, and the anime industry isn't above mining these excesses for laughs. But most shows made today follow the formula to the letter in hopes of hitting it big. Exceptions tend to slip through the cracks, even if they're great. But a few of those exceptions become legends. The opening credits theme for "Cowboy Bebop" is one such legend.
Beginnings
Before we talk about how "Cowboy Bebop" bends the rules of anime openings, it's worth discussing what those rules are. First and foremost, there must be a song, although the nature of the song changes as the tastes of the public change. The first popular television anime, 1963's "Astro Boy," had an orchestral theme. When its adaptation for American television included English lyrics, the Japanese staff quickly added Japanese lyrics sung by a children's choir to their version. A decade later in 1974, the creators of "Space Battleship Yamato" greatly invested in its theme, and it paid off. In a podcast "Anisongs and the History of Anime Music," produced by the Japan Society, Laurence Green says that the theme of "Yamato" "showed the scale at which anime could operate." "Yamato" and its successors proved that anime music could be an excellent-money making opportunity.
The theme songs of both "Yamato" and "Astro Boy" prominently feature the name of the show in the lyrics. This practice still has its place, particularly in rock acts like JAM Project. But over the years, anime music has evolved to become increasingly indistinguishable from regular pop music. A great example is Kenshi Yonezu's "KICKBACK," the opening theme to the currently airing "Chainsaw Man." The lyrics of "KICKBACK" tie directly into the themes of the show, and the unexpected sonic twists and turns in the full track evoke the unpredictability of Denji's story. But it also works perfectly fine as another hit by musical superstar Kenshi Yonezu, who frankly doesn't need "Chainsaw Man" to burnish his stellar reputation.
TANK!
The first big departure taken by "TANK!," the theme of "Cowboy Bebop," is that it barely has lyrics at all. It's a big, jazzy number driven by rocking instrumentation courtesy of composer Yoko Kanno's personal band, Seatbelts. The only words are those of Tim Jensen, who provides a brief introduction backed by bongo drums and a killer upright bass. "I think it's time we blow this scene," he says. "Get everybody and the stuff together. OK, three, two, one, let's jam." Cue the brass, and a musical sequence still capable of melting an audience's face off. "TANK!" is not the only great song in "Cowboy Bebop," and it may not even be the best. But it is a holy writ, and Netflix's 2021 adaptation could only leave it as is.
What the Netflix series couldn't match, despite its valiant efforts, were the visuals to the opening credits. Broken down to its component parts, the credits are comparable to others from the studio Sunrise at the time. Per Anime News Network, director Shinichiro Watanabe claimed in a 2013 panel at Otakon that "Cowboy Bebop" was greenlit to promote spaceship toys. Those spaceships are put front and center in the opening credits, in the same way that the Gundam takes the spotlight in the original "Mobile Suit Gundam" opening credits. In effect, though, the credits to the original "Cowboy Bebop" could not be more different. The characters' silhouettes smoke cigarettes as they dash through multi-colored split screens, resulting in a sequence that is sophisticatedly desperate, and intriguingly modern.
Cat burglars
It would be tempting to say that the opening credits of "Cowboy Bebop" were the first of their kind. But any anime fan worth their salt knows this is a lie. In 1995, three years before "Cowboy Bebop" aired, came the OVA (original video animation) "Gunsmith Cats." Its opening credits feature a big band soundtrack, strong pop art influence, and copious use of multi-colored split-screen. "Gunsmith Cats" lacks the same texture as "Bebop," since original creator Kenichi Sonoda was less interested in intangibles and more interested in showing the audience a good time. "Bebop" staff writer Keiko Nobumoto and composer Yoko Kanno gave "Bebop" a sense of humanity that took it beyond simple pastiche. But the opening credits of "Gunsmith Cats" are still impressive, even more so for beating "Bebop" to the punch.
At the root of "Cowboy Bebop" and "Gunsmith Cats" is "Lupin the 3rd." The opening credits for the series have changed over the course of its many seasons, but bear multiple similarities to the credits of "Bebop." The first sequence features familiar two-tone silhouettes in blue, red, and green. Later credits sequences introduce the famous "Lupin" theme, which is (with exceptions) a jazz-inflected instrumental piece. Shinichiro Watanabe is a big "Lupin the 3rd" fan, and Spike, Jet, and Faye in "Bebop" parallel rascally thief Lupin, his associate Jigen, and Fujiko the femme fatale. It makes perfect sense that the opening credits for "Bebop" would borrow from his favorite anime.
Cops and robbers
Like "Cowboy Bebop," "Lupin the 3rd" borrowed its best visual iconography from elsewhere. Just look at the opening credits for "It Takes a Thief," which aired from 1968 to 1970. Prolific title designer Wayne Fitzgerald utilizes two-tone colors, silhouettes, and, yes, split-screen, to sell the audience on the show's sophistication. Fitzgerald owes a debt to Maurice Binder's famous opening credits for the "James Bond" films, beginning with "Dr. No" in 1962. But just as important is Pablo Ferro, who pioneered the use of multi-screen in a video advertising the 1964 World's Fair in New York. Ferro would adapt this device for use in his opening credits for "The Thomas Crown Affair," with a truly decadent assembly of multi-colored split screens. "I was lucky that the costumes and the cinematography had the look of ... a bizarre magazine," he said in an interview with Art of the Title. In a sense, his credits for the film were a form of collage that remixed the source into something both familiar and unfamiliar.
Eventually, the techniques practiced by Binder and Ferro were repurposed by the cop dramas of the 1970s. For instance, the opening credits to the detective series "Barnaby Jones" begin by assembling the title logo via red and blue squares, reminiscent of Binder as well as legend Saul Bass. The opening credits of "Longstreet" borrow Ferro's multi-screen technique to arrange a nexus of surveillance around a single, all-seeing-eye that's stained blue. (Plus, the bass line goes as hard as "TANK!") My personal favorite is the opening title of "Ironside," a TV drama about a wheelchair-bound detective that aired from 1967 to 1975. The two-tone red and black silhouettes sell the charisma of the titular character, whose body fills the screen.
The new thieves
Not just "Lupin," but "Cowboy Bebop" and even "Gunsmith Cats" steal liberally from the designs of these credits. In the case of "Lupin," it was a matter of repurposing the style of contemporary spy and heist films for its own purposes. "Gunsmith Cats" borrowed the language of pop art and cop dramas to match the single-minded interests of its original creator, Kenichi Sonada. As for "Cowboy Bebop," the series was founded on pastiche. Shinichiro Watanabe and his crew were happy to borrow from "Lupin," so I wouldn't be surprised if they went back and repurposed the predecessors of the "Lupin" aesthetic as well.
That isn't to say that the "Cowboy Bebop" opening titles are unoriginal. If anything, the originality of the "Bebop" title sequence can be traced to its willingness to borrow from sources outside of traditional anime. The success of "Bebop" inspired other anime titles to experiment with their own credit sequences. The credits to "Lupin III: The Woman Named Fujiko Mine" set a montage of stylish charcoal nudity to spoken word poetry. The titles of "The Great Pretender" take clear influence from the title sequence for "Catch Me If You Can," which itself was a homage to the work of Saul Bass. The creators of these two sequences, "Fujiko" director Sayo Yamamoto and director Kotomi Deai, are both Watanabe proteges. The baton is passed to the next generation, and anime continues to evolve.