Cowboy Bebop - The Movie (2001)

excellent

this is a great movie with all the traditional voices and the feel of the original series. enjoyable, action packed, all around good hour and a half of my life. December 29, 2008

Action

This movie its great its in action movie but in a cartoon version ,trust me its great. September 29, 2008

Bebop a lula

Pretty decent treatment of a really well done anime film. The Cowboy Bebop series is legendary in its stature among anime fans and rightfully so. With top notch animation, characters that you grow to genuinely love and an amazing soundtrack by the frighteningly gifted Yoko Kanno, the series and the film are both instant classics.

The DVD has great surround sound and clear picture and the menus make good use of Kanno's ecelectic score. There are some interesting featurettes here that focus on the characters and the show in general and what makes it all so appealing. As for the film itself, I thought it fit well in the series overall and save for what felt sort of like an abrupt ending, I highly enjoyed it.

Recommended. August 17, 2008

Nice Addition to the Best Anime Series

The movie is highly enjoyable, and I would recommend it to any fan of the series. My only real complaint would be Spike seeming to like Electra Ovilo in a romantic way, which goes against Spikes longing for Julia of the series. But ignoring that it's very good. August 13, 2008

Not just a cartoon, a new genre itself

A spacecraft making a crash landing on a highway bridge, a taxi screeching to a stop and the pilot jumping out to say, "Yo, taxi!" symbolizes the situation humor in Cowboy Bebop. This movie, "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" (as titled in Japan) is set between episodes 22 and 23 of the TV series.

Bebop is the animated tale of 27-year-old Spike Spiegel, a slick Martial Artist and shooting ace estranged from the mafia, and his comrades: Jet Black, a 36-year-old former cop, Faye Valentine, a 23-year-old gambler on the run from her debts, Edward, a 13-year-old girl hacking genius, and Ein, a Welsh Corgi dog that was given above-average intelligence in lab experiments.

The setting of the movie is Mars in the year 2071. Mars, along with the other planets in the solar system, has been terra-formed into an Earth-like planet after a cosmic accident forced a mass emigration from Earth to other planets in the system. Smoking, Jazz and Cup Ramen still exist, while space travel blurs the distinction between living in space and living planet-side.

This ragtag bunch of "cowboys," or bounty hunters, travel the solar system in a spacecraft carrier ship, the Bebop, taking on often near-fatal missions to locate and apprehend dangerous "bounty heads" as they struggle to stay fed and keep their ships in good repair.

The antagonist, a former subject of military experiments which they all seek to find and stop, is bent on the destruction of human life on Mars through a nanovirus plague. A test vaccine made him immune, but also gave him amnesia and dreamlike hallucinations.

In Bebop, story and music are always linked. The movie is named after Bob Dylan's song. Yoko Kanno, a prolific composer of game and anime music, wrote the soundtrack for both the TV series and the movie. The TV series is mostly set to bebop, while the movie takes a rock beat.

Anime, the style of animation that director Watanabe Shinichirou chose for both the TV series and movie, is made up of stylized colorful art, futuristic settings, violence and sex. Some may say this is "just a cartoon," but with the violence, dirty words and bad habits of the characters, this is definitely not a cartoon for kids. For the mature viewer, intelligence put into the script, imagination into the art and virtuosity set to playing the music, transforms that classification into, to borrow a line, "a new genre itself." June 9, 2008

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