With the news that Yoko Kanno is returning to the Cowboy Bebop franchise by composing for the live-action adaptation, I thought it might be time to take a look at her history and career. Famous, and justly so, for her work on composing soundtracks for anime, this is merely one facet of her work and only one reason why the composer Yoko Kanno is so wonderful and spectacular.
Let’s start by looking at her early life. Yoko Kanno was born on the 18th of March, 1963 and found herself fascinated and drawn to the hymns sung at the church she attended. She learned how to play the piano at a very young age and ended up participating in a variety of composition contests. She eventually attended Waseda University, majoring in literature although she did end up joining a band elective where she discovered popular music such as pop and jazz. During this time, a company named Koei, which later merged with Tecmo to become Koei Tecmo, approached Yoko Kanno and asked her to compose the soundtrack for a game called Nobunaga’s Ambition. She accepted and the success of the game ended up jump starting her professional career.
Since we’re on the topic of video games, let’s cover her career composing for video games. Throughout the 80s and 90s, she continued to work closely with Koei, composing soundtracks for several more Nobunaga’s Ambition games, the Uncharted Waters games as well as several others. It wasn’t until 1998 that she would compose music for a video game published by someone other than Koei with the release of the Cowboy Bebop video game, published by Bandai. She later composed the Sega game Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream in 2000, the second Cowboy Bebop game in 2005, several MMOs such as Ragnarok Online 2 and Continent of the Ninth Seal and an arcade game, Starwing Paradox, released by Square Enix in 2018.
By the early 90s, Yoko Kanno began working in the area that she’s arguably most famous for, anime. She arranged the ending theme for the 1992 Studio Ghibli film Porco Rosso before going on to compose the soundtrack for Please Save My Earth, Macross Plus, Escaflowne and Turn A Gundam. However, it was the soundtrack that she composed for the 1998 anime Cowboy Bebop that catapulted her into the spotlight worldwide. The music of Cowboy Bebop was widely praised for the skillful use of jazz and blues music as well as touching on other genres such as metal, choral, pop and many others.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, Yoko Kanno continued to work on numerous anime such as RahXephon, Wolf’s Rain, Darker than Black and many others. However, I’d argue that her most popular work at this time, particularly in the West, was the soundtrack she composed for both seasons of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex as well as its TV movie sequel Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex – Solid State Society. These soundtracks were widely praised and have become as synonymous with the Ghost in the Shell franchise as the work of Kenji Kawai, the composer for the Mamoru Oshii films.
Finally, I’d like to bring up her work on live-action films and TV series. While not quite as famous or numerous as her contributions to anime, they’re still noteworthy with her composing the soundtrack for the 1994 kaiju film Yamato Takeru, also known as Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon, the 2004 live-action film Kamikaze Girls as well as the critically acclaimed 2015 film Our Little Sister and the 2017 historical drama TV series Naotora: The Lady Warlord.
The work of Yoko Kanno is truly astounding and I have no hesitation to say that she has crafted some of the finest anime soundtracks of all time. I also find the body of work she has done outside of anime absolutely fascinating and I’m quite curious to see how her work on the soundtrack of the live-action Cowboy Bebop series is received. Let me know your thoughts on the wonderful and spectacular composer Yoko Kanno, your favourite anime soundtracks from her, your thoughts on her non-anime work and any additional information you might have on the topic.
Hopefully you have found this article interesting and informative and, if you wish to seek any of the works I mentioned, don’t hesitate to use amazon.co.uk and amazon.com for all of your needs!