Shinichiro
Watanabe easily could have spent years making new episodes of his
successful Cowboy Bebop series or something similar. Even the Wachowski
Brothers, who liked Bebop and hired Watanabe to direct two of The
Animatrix episodes, asked him if the Bebop movie would be the end of
the line for that series. It was, and Watanabe went on to create the
Samurai Champloo series. On the surface, Champloo is a hip-hop series
that carries much of the spirit of the New York lifestyle and music,
but Watanabe said Champloo would be better described as a remix. "When
I was thinking of the story line for Samurai Champloo, I felt there
were similarities between hip-hop and my story," explained Watanabe.
Hip-hop uses older jazz and soul, and remixes that into something new
and fresh." Samurai films in Japan have the same reputation as westerns
in the U.S.; both genres take a stylized, partially accurate look
toward the past. Watanabe tried to freshen the old genre with Champloo,
saying there was a link between a lone samurai with a sword and a lone
rapper with a microphone. "It seemed natural to blend them together,"
he said.
When
someone wants "another Bebop" from Watanabe, he'll say "Sure, I
understand you," and go ahead and do what he wants. It'll be something
different from bebop, like the romantic live-action love comedy he'd
really like to create, or the two films he's now creating, one of which
will "...most likely become an incredibly strange action movie.
Watanabe usually writes the scripts for his films, and creates the
stories on his own - but the concepts aren't made in the order you
might expect. Where some people create stories and then develop
characters, Watanabe conceives the characters first. A shortcut is to
write a three-line description for each character, but Watanabe said
there's no human who can be described that easily. So the description
gets more complex in the writing, and in the animation as well - but
again, Watanabe doesn't think in a conventional manner. It's common to
write a story so a character goes through changes, but Watanabe doesn't
follow that standard path of character development. Rather, he prefers
character revelation, where "...I try ti introduce a different facet of
their personality in following episodes. So, my characters don't
develop all that much, but I do describe more of their different sides."
Shinichiro
Watanabe easily could have spent years making new episodes of his
successful Cowboy Bebop series or something similar. Even the Wachowski
Brothers, who liked Bebop and hired Watanabe to direct two of The
Animatrix episodes, asked him if the Bebop movie would be the end of
the line for that series. It was, and Watanabe went on to create the
Samurai Champloo series. On the surface, Champloo is a hip-hop series
that carries much of the spirit of the New York lifestyle and music,
but Watanabe said Champloo would be better described as a remix. "When
I was thinking of the story line for Samurai Champloo, I felt there
were similarities between hip-hop and my story," explained Watanabe.
Hip-hop uses older jazz and soul, and remixes that into something new
and fresh." Samurai films in Japan have the same reputation as westerns
in the U.S.; both genres take a stylized, partially accurate look
toward the past. Watanabe tried to freshen the old genre with Champloo,
saying there was a link between a lone samurai with a sword and a lone
rapper with a microphone. "It seemed natural to blend them together,"
he said.
When
someone wants "another Bebop" from Watanabe, he'll say "Sure, I
understand you," and go ahead and do what he wants. It'll be something
different from bebop, like the romantic live-action love comedy he'd
really like to create, or the two films he's now creating, one of which
will "...most likely become an incredibly strange action movie.
Watanabe usually writes the scripts for his films, and creates the
stories on his own - but the concepts aren't made in the order you
might expect. Where some people create stories and then develop
characters, Watanabe conceives the characters first. A shortcut is to
write a three-line description for each character, but Watanabe said
there's no human who can be described that easily. So the description
gets more complex in the writing, and in the animation as well - but
again, Watanabe doesn't think in a conventional manner. It's common to
write a story so a character goes through changes, but Watanabe doesn't
follow that standard path of character development. Rather, he prefers
character revelation, where "...I try ti introduce a different facet of
their personality in following episodes. So, my characters don't
develop all that much, but I do describe more of their different sides."
