<em>Cowboy Bebop: The Movie</em>… At Last

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Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is finally here. The bounty hunters (clockwise from top) Jet Black, Faye Valentine, Edward Wong and Spike Spiegel track terrorists. Courtesy of Destination Films and Samuel Goldwyn Films, unless otherwise noted. [1]

Anime fans do not need to be told how good Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is; they have been waiting impatiently for almost two years. In fact, fans have been suffering for the past year squinting at blurry bootleg video copies, or wincing at the pidgin-English subtitles on the imported Hong Kong DVD release. Now it is finally coming to American theaters with a superb English dubbing, co-distributed by Destination Films and Samuel Goldwyn Films. The initial release, on April 4th, will be in seventeen major cities across the U.S. If the box office is favorable, this may be expanded.

Hot, Hot, Hot
Cowboy Bebop has been a controversial favorite since it was created by Japan's Sunrise animation studio as an adult TV series five years ago. TV theme popularity tends to come in waves, and late 1997-early 1998 in Japan looked like the time for "space adventure" shows. Two of the better examples that season were Sunrise's Outlaw Star [2] (an interstellar Treasure Island) and Madhouse's Trigun [3] (a space Western on the planet Gunsmoke).

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Director Shinichiro Watanabe crafted the Cowboy Bebop series as an homage to American movies and television. © Bandai Entertainment. [4]

Cowboy Bebop was not just an average TV anime series for Sunrise. It was one that the entire studio got really enthusiastic over and assigned its top talent to. (Cowboy Bebop's creator-of-record is "Hajime Yatate," Sunrise's well-known house pseudonym for a team effort.) The leader of the creative team was director Shinichiro Watanabe, a fan favorite as the director of the futuristic military adventure series Macross Plus [5] and Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory. Watanabe wanted to design not just a space adventure series for adolescent boys but a program that would appeal to sophisticated adults. His main inspiration was the Lupin III anime series, which had been mega-popular from the late 1970s through the mid-'80s, about a debonair roguish international jewel thief and his "cool" gang in jet-set locales. They were sympathetic because they preyed upon truly despicable rich villains rather than the innocent.

Other leading members of Sunrise's creative team were scriptwriter Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, mechanical art designer Kimitoshi Yamane, and composer Yoko Kanno. Most of them had worked together before, in addition to having credits on other popular anime titles. Nobumoto had scripted Macross Plus, Kawamoto had designed the characters for Gundam 0083, and Kanno had written the music for Macross Plus (which needed an extremely strong score to support the plot about the rise of a popular singing idol who turns out to be a computer-generated Artificial Intelligence) and The Vision of Escaflowne. Yamane had not worked with Watanabe, but his credits included such other anime hits as Bubblegum Crisis and The Vision of Escaflowne [6].

The space-adventure update of Lupin III that Watanabe's team came up with was a "frontier" interplanetary culture of 2071 A.D. The Solar System has been colonized (forget the American publicity ad copy about humanity spreading "to the stars;" the action is all between Venus and Neptune), but it is a grungy society of mostly bubble-domed small communities on asteroids and the moons of the gas-giant planets, plus artificial space stations. Only Venus and Mars have any large cities. The cultural influences of this space society are as much Chinese as Western. There is a confusing conglomeration of independent governments, alliances and spheres of influence. The only system-wide organizations seem to be a unified police force, the ISSP (Inter Solar System Police), which is widely considered to be corrupt and ineffective; and powerful crime families which combine the worst aspects of the Italian Mafia and the Chinese Triads.

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The Spaceship Bebop carries the team on their missions. [7]

Due to the general helplessness of individual police forces at dealing with anything more serious than local petty crime, most governments have fallen back on posting rewards for the capture of serious criminals. This has created a new occupation of bounty hunters, popularly called "cowboys," who roam the Solar System looking for criminals with big rewards. Cowboy Bebop is about one particular "odd couple" team of these cowboys aboard the Bebop, a decrepit used spaceship. The core duo, introduced in the first episode, are Spike Spiegel and Jet Black, two macho good buddies who (it turns out from their conversation) only met shortly before deciding to team up and do not really know much about each other's pasts. The next few episodes add the remaining three of the team: Faye Valentine, a femme fatale bounty hunter, who alternates between joining their hunts as a partner and competing with them as a rival; "Ed," a young adolescent brilliant computer hacker (technically a she, although Ed is so androgynous that it is easier to think of her as an "it"); and Ein, an apparently normal dog (Welsh Corgi) with cryptic hints of abnormal capabilities. (One of the running gags of the series is leading the audience into trying to catch Ein doing something super-canine.)

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Spike Spiegel, one of the first characters introduced in the TV series, also stars in the feature film. [8]

Bebop History
The most important of the many elements that made Cowboy Bebop so successful is its sophisticated and mature attitude. Watanabe made no secret that, in addition to Lupin III, it was largely his tribute to his favorite American movies and TV series, which were shown in Japan during the 1970s and '80s including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (the relationship between Spike and Jet), anything with Bruce Lee (Spike is a martial-arts fanatic), anything with a blues or jazz sound track, and lots of Blaxploitation movies (the series has a very racially diverse supporting cast). Individual movies from Alien to Midnight Run were pastiched and parodied. One main attraction was that the audience was always kept guessing over the nature of the next episode. Would it be a comedy, a detective caper, an action thriller, a somber mood piece, which would reveal some more of one of the main cast's past, or something else unexpected. The hot music motif was emphasized in many of the episode titles (in English) such as: "Asteroid Blues," "Honky Tonk Women," "Ballad of Fallen Angels," "Heavy Metal Queen," "Jamming With Edward," "Jupiter Jazz" and "Mushroom Samba."

Faye Valentine plays the femme fatale bounty hunter who gives as good as she gets.

The dialogue was kept "clean," but its level of sophistication was appropriate to adults in a criminal milieu. Drug dealing and homosexuality were key elements of some episodes. As a result, Cowboy Bebop achieved the unique record that only half of its 26 episodes were considered suitable for TV broadcast during its initial run on the TV Tokyo network as a Friday primetime 6:00 p.m. series (April 3 through June 26, 1998). The remaining 13 episodes were initially available when the whole series was released on video. The entire series was finally shown on TV on the WOWOW satellite channel on Fridays at 1:00 a.m., October 23, 1998 through April 23, 1999. The TV series won awards in Japan including the 3rd Kobe Animation Festival's award in the Best TV Animation category, and the 2000 annual Japan National Science Fiction Convention's Uchusen SF Award for Best Media science-fiction.

Cowboy Bebop has been a similar fan favorite in America. It originally appeared as one of Bandai Entertainment's early anime home video releases, two episodes dubbed or subtitled on thirteen videos between September 1999 and October 2000. Anime fans who are often critical of the quality of English dubbing agreed that Cowboy Bebop's was one of the best-dubs yet. That was quickly superseded by a bilingual DVD release in six volumes between April and November 2000. The conventional wisdom among anime fans was that Cowboy Bebop was too mature to ever appear on American TV. When it did finally show up on The Cartoon Network's new "Adult Swim" block on September 2, 2001 (at 11:30 p.m. EST), the edits and omitted episodes served as new publicity for the uncut DVDs. A fancy Cowboy Bebop: The Perfect Sessions complete DVD boxed set was released in November 2001 for not quite $200. More recently, Cowboy Bebop: Best Sessions (November 2002) is a two-disc DVD of the six most popular episodes "reedited and remixed ... under the direct supervision of series director Shinichiro Watanabe." All of this new marketing would not be possible if Cowboy Bebop did not continue to be extremely popular.

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Terrorist suspect Rachid faces off against Spike Spiegel. [9]

The Big Screen Release
And now the movie! The TV/DVD series was so popular in Japan that there was never any doubt that there would be a theatrical release. Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door is crafted by the same "dream team" of creators: "Yatate," Watanabe, Nobumoto, Kawamoto, Yamane and Kanno. The theatrical budget permitted the story to be set in "Alba City, the capital of Mars;" the major human city off Earth. This is the excuse to create a much larger and more detailed metropolitan cityscape than in any of the TV episodes, which blends aspects of New York City, Tokyo and an ethnic Near-Eastern "Morocco Street" neighborhood. The 116-minute running time allows for the slow buildup of a tremendously suspenseful plot. Each of the main cast is given at least one scene in which to stand out to please their fans, but the main protagonist is Spike Spiegel. He has two lengthy action scenes in which he gets to demonstrate his martial-arts expertise, which has been only hinted at in the TV episodes.

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Spike Spiegel leads the hunt for the biggest capture reward ever, but the cowboys might get more than they bargained for from the government. [10]

The studio press kit for the American-retitled Cowboy Bebop: The Movie English-dubbed theatrical feature (featuring the same popular voice cast as the TV series) says that it made "its world premiere at the Big Apple Anime Fest 2002 (BAAF) in New York City [on Labor Day weekend]." But its original Japanese release was on September 1, 2001. (It was in Japan's top 15 box office for five weeks. In July 2002 it won the SPJA Industry Award, presented at Anime Expo in Long Beach, California, in the 2001 Best Japanese Anime Theatrical Release category.) This is significant because, if it had been delayed for just a few weeks, it would have looked like a blatant and unimaginative imitation of the 9/11/01 NYC terrorism combined with its follow-ups. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie features a deadly terrorist threat involving massive explosions and what appears to be the release of an unknown bioplague that kills thousands in a cityscape that is practically rotoscoped from NYC. The suspects include a mysterious Rachid in an Arabic district. At the same time that the largest reward in history is offered for the terrorists (which attracts our Bebop gang), the authorities (both government and some powerful corporate villains) react with authoritarian force against all possible suspects. There are ominous implications that any bounty hunters who do actually find the terrorists may not be rewarded but "disappeared" for Knowing Too Much. One wonders whether a reason for the delay in the movie's general release since its film festival premiere last August has been that it was still too close to the 9/11/01 attacks.

So it is finally being released. But, despite Cowboy Bebop's popularity with the American fans, it is only getting an art-theater release: one theater each in seventeen cities (well, two in NYC). Will it do well enough to earn a wider release for itself, or for the next anime theatrical feature to be released in America? Let's hope...

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), was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific [11], ed. by John A. Lent (2001).