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Cowboy Bebop, Carole & Tuesday's Shinichiro Watanabe Directs Flying Lotus Music Video

Carole & Tuesday and Cowboy Bebop director Shinichiro Watanabe and his team of animators worked together to create the music video for Flying Lotus' track "More" featuring Anderson Paak. Flying Lotus is one of several musical talents lending their chops to Watanabe and BONES' Carole & Tuesday anime series. The director and musician pair also worked together on the Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 anime short in 2017.

The music video shows a wayward space traveler crash land on a dusty red planet. He's seemingly alone until he encounters a robot selling "flowers" underneath an umbrella. On his table is scrawled, "Your ego is your seed." The man and the robot are surrounded by organic-looking plant life built of muscle, sinew, and organs.

Warp Records commented on the video about Watanabe and Flying Lotus' collaborative relationship:

Flying Lotus and Shinichiro Watanabe's creative kinship was cultivated while working on BLADE RUNNER: BLACK OUT 2020; the mutual respect led to them collaborating on this video.

Watanabe had this to say about their connection - “Flying Lotus' sound and Anderson Paak's rap on this track are just incredible. Their work greatly inspired me to direct this music video for them with some of the finest anime talents in Japan. Flying Lotus is such an amazing talent, so it is a great honor to work with Flying Lotus again after our first collaboration on BLADE RUNNER: BLACK OUT 2022. We like working with each other so much that we are already collaborating on another series project of mine called CAROLE & TUESDAY. Our creative team worked really hard to create this video for Lotus and we hope we did justice to this wonderful new track. Please enjoy!”

Flying Lotus expressed similar admiration for Watanabe on Twitter.

The music video premiered during the Toonami programming block on May 11.

The video's full credits are:

• Director: Shinichiro Watanabe
• Character and Concept Design: Hidekazu Ohara
• Concept Art: Santiago Montiel
• Visual Director/Composite: sankaku
• Key Animation: Hidekazu Ohara, Yūtarō Kubo, Hiromitsu Seki, Motonobu Hori, Masanobu Hiraoka, Kenichi Kutsuna, Yuki Matsuo
• Color Coordinate: Aiko Matsuyama, Yu Sato
• Background Art: Takashi Aoi
• 3D Modeling: Gregorios Kythreotis
• Motion Capture Supervisor: Takuma Nakata
• Editing: Takashi Sakurai
• Producer: Daichi Kagawa, Joseph Chou

The animation was produced at the Storyriders animation studio.

The Carole and Tuesday anime series is currently airing in Japan and will debut in North America on the Netflix streaming platform at a later date. The original series boasts an international talent pool of musicians and artists including Canadian singer Mocky, Norwegian record producer Lido, Dutch singer Benny Sings, Seattle-based musician Jen Wood, Keane's Tim Rice-Oxley, songwriter Evan "Kidd" Bogart, composer Maisa Tsuno, Kings of Convenience's Eirik Glambek Bøeand, G.RINA, Thundercat, m-flo's Taku Takuhashi, Maika Loubté, Cero, Taro Umebayashi, D.A.N., Madison McFerrin, Taylor McFerrin, Mark Redito, Alison Wonderland, and Nulbarich.