Cowboy Bebop

Whenever I get asked about my favorite TV show, I reply with Cowboy Bebop. I'm not as big of an anime fan as I once was, but this should positively captivated me when I watched it at first, and it's only gotten better with age. I've watched it in the Japanese with subtitles once, and then watched the English sub at least 3 times.

The offspring of creative genius Shinichiro Watanabe, Cowboy Bebop is the story of Spike Spiegel and his gang of misfit bounty hunters. Jet is a former police officer, Faye is an unlucky professional gambler, Ed is a child tech prodigy of uncertain gender, and Ein is a data dog (what?). The show features a fantastic mix in which some episodes are purely episodic, following the crew as the pursue bounties across space, and others forward the main story of Spike. The episodic episodes will frequently give a chance for character development for the other 3 characters (Ein doesn't have much character development, as one might expect from a dog). 

The primary story follows Spike's attempt to distance himself from a painful past as part of a crime syndicate, and the relationships that he built while there.

With some anime that follow this basic structure (some episodic, some following a story arc), one part of the structure can be much better and strong than another. Rurouni Kenshin, for example, tends to become stale and boring during the episodic portions, whereas the story arcs of Kenshin dealing with his past as a manslayer are when the show really sparkles. Bebop, however, always shines regardless of approach.

The show is hilarious, with Ed and Ein in particular providing fantastic comic relief, while the straight characters of Spike and Jet serve only to accentuate the fantastic comic vision of Watanabe. The episode Mushroom Samba is outrageously funny, perhaps being surpassed in comic brilliance only by Baseball Blues, an episode from Wantanabe's other anime, Samurai Champloo (a full review of that to come).

The music of the show is phenomenal, and provides a sort of skeletal structure to the show. The title Cowboy Bebop includes a form of Jazz (bebop) popularized by Charlie Parker and and perfected by Dizzy Gillespie. Most episodes include a reference to a genre or style of music or dance or a song, and feature music in the episode that go along with the title.  The soundtrack by Yoko Kanno, and performed by her band Seatbelts (created for the show), shows her fierce creativity in composition and demonstrates the band's remarkable aesthetic versatility to transition from genre to genre with ease. The opening theme is particularly notable, and is to this day the only theme song of any TV show that I will listen to in its entirety in each and every episode.

The animation is still, nearly 20 years later, the best I have ever seen in any TV show. The animation in the movie is the best I've seen, period. If you don't believe me, go check it out.

The fights are beautifully choreographed, and each character has a unique and immediately identifiable fighting style that translates brilliantly to screen. Spike, for example, fights using the no motion wasted minimalism of Bruce Lee as an obvious inspiration, while Jet has a more rough and tumble brawling style.

The pacing and story of the show are brilliant. I don't want to give away anything, but I will simply say that the ending is perfect, and the show is a bit too short for a perfect length, which is in itself perfect. Like no other show or movie I have ever seen, when I first finished Cowboy Bebop it was like an old friend had left me. I craved more, which is what artistic perfection looks like. When I think about other things that leave me that way, it's frequently music, including Kind of Blue (Miles Davis), Milestones (Miles), Bitches' Brew (Miles), In a Silent Way (Miles), Ah Um (Charles Mingus), Changes Two (Charles Mingus), Leviathan (Mastodon), and Blackwater Park (Opeth). There may be a few others, but note that these are all short form art. There are a few games that have declared endings about which I feel that way (Shovel Knight, Super Mario World, Mega Man X, Link to the Past, a Link Between Worlds, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy V, VI, and VII, and a few others, probably), but most are simply too long to be left wanting more. The longer the experience, the more chinks in the armor begin to show, and the more my limited attention span tends to wane.

At nearly 10 hours of content, that Bebop leaves me desperately wanting more shows just how few chinks there are. It's a show for which I crave a sequel, but am secretly glad I never got one (especially since I got the brilliant Samurai Champloo from Watanabe instead). In fact, I can't think of one bad thing to say about this show. If you haven't watched it before, it's beautiful art for anyone, not just anime fans. And you may watch it and find yourself becoming a bit of a Japanophile like me. I'd give it a 10/10.

-TRO