Cowboy Bebop Review

Cowboy Bebop is an award-winning 1998 Japanese anime series directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, written by Keiko Nobumoto, and produced by Studio Sunrise. Comprised of 26 episodes completeing a story arch set in 2071. It follows the lives of a group of bounty hunters aka cowboys as they come to terms with their pasts, their presents, and the effects of both and everything in between while living on a space ship named the Bebop. It won numerous awards for animation and was voted the best anime of all time in a american poll during the 90s
Cowboy Bebop was one of the first Anime i initially saw while it was aired on Adult Swim, the nightime block on Cartoon Network. It was also one of the main influences that actually got me interested in anime in th first place, and rightfully so. It is openly reffered to as one of the best series within the genre of Japanese animation due to its compelling story, interesting and believable characters, excellent animation for a television show for the time and still to this day.
The story takes place in a future world only a bit further then our own when mass space travel has begun to take off but is far from perfected. In 2022 a warp gate (the method for planatary travel in the bebop universe) explodes causing catastrophic damage on to the moon leaving debri from the explosion littering the Earths orbit. Which begins to constantly bombard the planet making it almost unihabitable, causing most people to then simply move to colonoies the inner belt of planets and the moons of Jupiter and space stations orbiting these plantes. Leaving the Earth economically dead and home only to the poor and to those unable to let go of the past.
The show however as mentioned does not start until 2071 years later, the demand for space travel has allowed warp gates to become more reliable and are now set up to allow travel throught the entire solar system. Mars becoming the center of human civilization. Crime synicates similar to the Mafia in the chaos after the abandoment of earth have grabbed for themselves a large amount of power influencing every part of the goverment and police. This results in organized crime managemnet being inneffective and a bounty system is created to help deal with crime setting up the career and life style of the crew of the Bebop.
The crew of the Bebop ultimatly consists of Jet Black, Spike Speigel, Fei Valentine, Edward and a Welsh Corgi name Ein. The owner of the Bebop being Jet who had before aquiring the rest of the crew enlisted Spikes help due to his combat ability. The rest of the crew are aquired threw the rest of the series and their presence often serves as a annoyance to both Spike and Jet. By the end of the series the entire cast of characters pasts are explained well and serve to help explain the main idea of the series other then Ed who seemed to be around solely to give the team a computer hacker and a tie to earth. His past never is explained in the detail that the rest of the cast is.
Arguably one of the strongest parts of the shows was its soundtrack which was created in collaboration with two groups by the names of Yoko Kanno and The Seatbelts most of the shows music is in English unlike most shows and the genre of music is largerly Rock and Jazz but is almost always fitting to the tone and atmosphere of the show and never gets annoying. They almost never repeat the same tracks over and over so the music never gets a chance to get old, and new tracks are thrown at you each episode to match the theme of each episode. The individual names of some episodes being named after real life songs and others the shows own soundtrack.
This is a very hard show to really review because theirs really not much wrong with it. It is an exceptional show from beginning to end compared to any genre, be it live action or animated. The only problems with the entire series and be it small ones is that many people will find the series to end on a bit of a bumber. Some people will not be bothered by this while other people will hate the way it ends. I personally do not mind a bitter sweet ending because sadly happy endings do not come around very often in reality. It just serves to make the story of Cowboy Bebop be that much more believable. Some of the CGI used in the series does not age all that gracefully and looks a little rough around the edges compared to what were used to seeing now in modern day film and televison.

I personally own the Cowboy Bebop Remix Complete Collection (Anime Legends) set, the video quality is great even on a HD television using an upscaling DVD player. The case is nice and strong and the surround sound is a nice update. This is one of those shows that when i started buying Anime i felt i had to grab hands down, and im glad i did. I find myself whipping out this site pretty often lol.

The final rundown

Story

A

Characters

A-

Animation

B+

Sountrack

A+

What are your feelings about Cowboy Bebop?