There is no anime creator I struggle more with than Shinichiro Watanbe. Intellectually, I understand why his work is so acclaimed, and I respect the immense talent and craft that goes into everything he produces. But time and time again, his shows just fail to connect with me. Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, for all their impressive qualities, always seemed to keep me at a distance, admiring them like art pieces behind a thick glass window instead of welcoming me into their beating, bleeding heart. They’re whirlwind showcases of some of the most technically gifted artists working in this medium, yet very little of that talent struck a chord in me beyond “Well, that was interesting.” And when his work does capture something that speaks to me, like the fatalistic beauty of Zankyou no Terror or the heartfelt whimsy of Carole and Tuesday, it’s marred by a messy script that fails to do justice to such immaculate vibes. Watanabe is a man of many talents, but he’s never been able to truly win my heart. Maybe one of these days, he’ll finally make something I can wholly love the way I want to. But it’s not gonna happen today, and unless the second season is significantly better, it’s not gonna be with Space Dandy.

Okay, calling Space Dandy a Watanabe show may be a tad misleading. The actual director is Shingo Natsume, who would later become famous for the fantastic first season of One Punch Man and the immensely captivating art-house masterpiece Sonny Boy. Watanabe’s role on this show is more as a creative overseer, bringing together as many talented people as he possibly can and letting them loose to do whatever the hell they want. Which, yeah, that collaborative freedom has always been a big part of his creative process, but Space Dandy takes that concept farther than anything else he’s worked on. The only consistency is the premise and core cast: it’s the far reaches of outer space, humans and aliens live side by side, and our protagonists, similar to the Bebop crew are a bunch of down-on-their-luck bounty hunters, though in their case, they’re only hunting rare and undiscovered alien species. Dandy is a lecherous slacker who goes with the flow and wants to spend all his money and cash at a restaurant chain that’s essentially just Hooters in space. Meow is a cat-like alien loser who’s basically freeloading off Dandy’s ship. QT, the ship’s sentient robot vacuum and engineer, acts as the straight man to the other’s antics. There’s also some purposefully poorly defined big galactic war going on somewhere in the background, and a team of recurring villains from one of those armies are pursuing Dandy for reasons neither we nor he are aware of. I imagine this will become more relevant in season 2, but for now, it’s just an excuse to have a Team Rocket-style bumbling villain squad pop in every now and then to spice things up. They’re my favorite characters in the show, and I always enjoyed seeing them pop up.

Aside from that, though? The name of the game is freedom, baby. Each episode is helmed by a different creative team, and those teams are given free reign to take that cast, setting, and premise in whatever direction they damn well please. The first episode even ends with the main characters dying in a planetary explosion, only for them to show up next episode like it never happened. If nothing else, it’s a very effective way of setting expectations: this is not a show you come to for tight continuity or lasting consequences. This is a show you watch to see how each different team of talented anime artists chooses to interpret the broad strokes of Space Dandy as a concept. What kind of story will they tell? What animation style will they use? What kind of tone will they try to set? The universe is a big place, after all, and there’s no telling what kind of wild and imaginative situations this crew might find themselves in. The only limits are what the people behind each episode can dream up.

And to its credit, Space Dandy really does showcase that diverse creativity. No two episodes feel exactly the same, and each creator puts their own unique touch in ways both subtle and obvious. Some episodes lean into the goofier, cartoony side of Dandy’s world, all ridiculous alien designs and exaggerated character animation. Others lean harder into extraterrestrial awe and existentialism, with evocative camerawork and heavily stylized animation. Some are relatively normal affairs, while others are completely off the walls. At one point, Dandy literally surfs the dust of an exploding planet. At another, he and his entire crew, robot QT included, turn into zombies and grapple with the question of how to keep living once you’re dead. Then there’s episode 9, directed by future Science Saru producer Eun-Yeong Choi, which dives full-tilt into Masaaki-Yuasa-style abstraction in animation for one of my favorite episodes of the bunch. And just to drive that sense of diversity home, my other favorite episode, episode 10, is one of the series’ most grounded episodes, using the classic “stuck in a time loop“ trope as a metaphor to explore the apathy and wanderlust of growing up in some backwater town where every day is the same anyway. That willingness to experiment with mood and style is Watanabe’s strongest skill, and honestly, Space Dandy’s freeform world is probably the best fit for it yet. Unlike with Champloo and Bebop, no episodes feel tonally dissonant, because every episode is equally free from expectations of any sort. The creators can all just go in whatever direction they want, and the universe is easily big enough to handle all those different visions at once.

Unfortunately, this is also where the problems come on. Because with any anthology series, especially one with as loose continuity as Space Dandy, your enjoyment is gonna come down to how much you enjoy each episodic story on its own terms. And to be blunt, there’s a lot of episodes in Space Dandy that are just kinda “meh” at best. Episode 3 is a mostly uninteresting take on the “sexy alien lady is secretly a bloodthirsty monster” trope. Episode 5 is an even more paint-by-numbers “Dandy travels with a feisty kid and becomes her surrogate dad for a time” story. Episode 7 is about Dandy getting jealous over a narcissistic pretty boy getting all the girls and entering in a spaceship race to try and beat him. These storylines were already getting trite back in Bebop’s time, and they’ve only become less interesting since then. And that’s probably my biggest issue with Watanabe’s work as a whole: for all his visual and cinematic imagination, he rarely applies that same level of imagination to his actual storytelling. I’ve seen so many versions of the stories he chooses to tell, and he never tells them in an interesting enough way to make them fresh again. Maybe it reads less chiche to Japanese audiences who aren’t as familiar with the Western storytelling tropes Watanabe likes to draw on, but they mostly just leave me cold.

Of course, Champloo and Bebop at least had effortlessly cool main characters to try and pick up the slack where the storytelling fell short. Which brings me to Space Dandy’s other critical flaw: Dandy himself. Remember when I described him as lecherous a few paragraphs ago? Yeah, sadly, that comes with all the baggage you might imagine. He’s never an outright sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen, but my god, I didn’t even last two episodes before I wanted to slap the shit out of him. It is exhausting spending time in his meathead mind, listening to him wax poetic about boobs and butts while dreaming about going back to that titty restaurant again. it’s the equivalent of being stuck at some obnoxious college party with a drunk frat bro spewing chauvinistic slop at you like he thinks it’s “funny” and assumes you’ll find it funny too. Which maybe wouldn’t be as frustrating if there were some interesting female characters to offset Dandy’s piggishness, but nope. Basically every female character in this show is either a brainless bimbo, a walking pinup, a damseled maiden, or that one evil temptress who seduces men to kill and eat them I mentioned earlier. So the show basically treats women the same way Dandy thinks of women, and that’s just not a pleasant thought stream to be a part of. At least Faye Valentine and Fuu got to kick some ass every once in a while.

I don’t hate Space Dandy’s first season. Frankly, I don’t even dislike it. But it’s the weakest of Watanave’s work I’ve seen thus far, and it’s representative of why his stuff just keeps bouncing off me. Hopefully the second season, as with Bebop and Champloo, will bring it to a strong enough finish that I still find it an overall worthwhile experience. But until then, I'm once again left wishing that such an incredibly talented artist was able to connect with me the same way he seems to connect with everyone else.