The DVD release of Cowboy Bebop: The Movie will give audiences a chance to see the movie. © 2001 Sunrise Bones Bandai Visual. All rights reserved.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie.
Theatrical feature, 2001. Director: Shinichiro Watanabe. 116 minutes. Price & format: DVD trilingual (Japanese, English, French) $26.95. Distributor: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment.

This is not a review but an addendum to my review of this movie in the March AWM, at the time of its theatrical release. You probably did not see it in the theaters, since according to the statistics posted on the Box Office Mojo Website, it never played on more than 29 screens nationwide during its 12-week run between April 4 and June 22, 2003. Its grosses were only $987,252. This is a big disappointment, as any of the many American fans of Cowboy Bebop can tell you. (Fans of Spirited Away have been similarly disappointed with the poor public response to Disney's theatrical re-release of that movie following its winning the Oscar in the Best Animated Feature Film category.)

Fortunately, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is now available on DVD. In addition to the 116-minute feature (dubbed in English, or in Japanese with English or French subtitles), the special features include six "behind-the-scenes featurettes" of six- to eight-minutes each featuring Japanese director Shinichiro Watanabe, character designer and animation director Toshihiro Kawamoto, composer Yoko Kanno, both the Japanese and American voice actors for the main cast, plus others such as American ADR director Mary E. McGlin. Two of these featurettes are on the general making of the movie and on the international appeal of the whole series. The other four focus upon each of the main cast of Spike, Faye, Jet and Ed.

Other features include "storyboard comparisons" of four key scenes of about four-minutes each (a split-screen comparison of the storyboard sketches and the finished animation); plus such now-standard anime DVD bonuses as "music videos" of the opening and closing credits background footage with their theme songs, but without the overlaid credits, and "art galleries" of 40 character sketches, 39 sketches of the aircraft, 20 of the futuristic automobiles and so forth. The total is more than an hour of bonus materials.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment's The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).