Cowboy Bebop

1998–99. TV series. (26 X 30 min.) Science fiction/crime thriller/comedy. dir Shinichiro Watanabe. scr Keiko Nobumoto, Sadayuki Murai, Shinichiro Watanabe, others. mus Yoko Kanno. des Toshihiro Kawamoto, Junichi Higashi. -bc

Cowboy Bebop was a groundbreaking anime TV series that combined the comic caper aspects of Lupin the 3rd with futuristic outer-space settings and the most colorful music score ever heard in anime to tell the rollicking tale of a 21st-century bounty hunter and his misadventures throughout the solar system.

Bounty hunter Spike Spiegel is young, sportily dressed, well-armed, skilled in martial arts, and pursues fugitives throughout the solar system. He is assisted by Jet Black, an oft-wounded, older ex-cop with mechanical legs and a mechanical left arm. The two of them keep tabs on their quarry through a TV broadcast called “Big Shots for the Bounty Hunters,” in which two live-wire hosts single out the most wanted criminals and the current prices on their heads. During the course of the series, they go after drug dealers, syndicate assassins, eco-terrorists, hackers, credit card thieves, and assorted intergalactic miscreants. Most of the time they don’t get the bounty due to some loophole or blunder, so they’re often broke.

Along the way, the two are joined, gradually, by three unwanted sidekicks: a smart dog named Ein who was the subject of a data storage experiment; Faye Valentine, an attractive, world-weary young woman with an eye for a quick buck, the skill of a seasoned con artist and, occasionally, a heart of gold; and finally, Ed, an eccentric adolescent female computer hacker who takes control of their ship with her game console whenever they try to abandon her.

The characters travel in spaceships through hyperspace gates that allow them to traverse the distance from Earth to Saturn in a matter of minutes. Their cases require trips to orbiting space station resorts, backwater colonies on Mars, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and sometimes their home planet, a still populated but devastated Earth.

Through it all we gradually piece together Spike’s background as a syndicate man and his unfinished business involving a girl named Julia and a rival named Vicious, which all comes to a violent head in the final episode. We also learn of Faye’s history as a privileged Earth girl who was cryogenically frozen for fifty years after a hyperspace accident and then revived, but in a state of amnesia.

The series is filled with clever and imaginative stylistic touches, starting with the ingenious character design. The five main characters are completely distinct personalities with bodies, faces, and movements designed to express exactly who they are and how they inhabit their living space. Spike is tall and lanky, all arms, elbows and knees, quick to react in a fight, but given to stretching out and spreading in all directions in his downtime. Faye is lean yet curvy and can pour on ample amounts of slinky charm when needed, but is often listless and melancholy, given to curling up in down moments, a vulnerable gesture that earns enough viewer sympathy to make up for all her duplicity. Jet, the ex-cop, is muscular, wizened, hardened, and weighted down by his mechanical limbs, giving him stronger grounding and a greater sense of control than his more flighty companions. The wild-looking Ed flops around like the impulsive, gawky, precocious adolescent she is and operates entirely on her own frequency. Ein, the dog, observes everyone with deep interest, punctuating Ed’s every utterance with a knowing bark. These are affectionately drawn characters with enormous appeal, who keep us interested even when the going gets incomprehensible.

The settings are predominantly 20th century in style, including border towns with Southwestern desert motifs and a city on Mars modeled on the Hong Kong–inspired metropolis seen in Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell. The characters we see in these places are usually underworld or other marginal types who dress, move, and talk just like they would on Earth. The opening episode with its Tijuana bar shootout looks like something out of a Robert Rodriguez movie. Later, on another colony, the characters all look like rejects from a 1970s blaxploitation movie. In fact, there’s a 1970s drive-in movie feel in many episodes.

Amidst the explosion of anachronistic fashions and styles are numerous examples of sophisticated high-tech space hardware, including the impressive Gates of Hyperspace, which take space travelers from one end of the solar system to the other in breathtaking bursts of speed that recall similar effects in Star Wars and the final section of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The main characters fly around in neatly designed personal vehicles which can battle opponents in furious aerial combat or simply take the occupants to convenience stores or gas stations where they can lower the ship into a parking lot. The blending of familiar 20th-century settings and structures with all sorts of futuristic high-tech flourishes is consistently clever and original.

The music by Yoko Kanno goes a long way toward fashioning the style and mood of the whole piece. There are jazz, blues, country, Southwestern, and religious motifs, depending on the setting of the episode. There are many original songs, mostly in English, some in a rock vein, some folk, some jazz, and some splendidly old-fashioned torch songs. Kanno is clearly as important a collaborator here as any of the other key creative participants. In fact, most of the twenty-six episode titles reference a different musical style (“Ballad for Fallen Angels,” “Heavy Metal Queen,” “Waltz for Venus,” “Jupiter Jazz,” “Mushroom Samba,” “Cowboy Funk,” “The Real Folk Blues,” etc.).

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (aka Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, 2001, movie)

Cowboy Bebop comes as close as any filmed sci-fi to depicting the anarchic, multicultural vision of space colonization depicted in William Gibson’s pioneering 1984 cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer. The basic point is that people will still be the same when we colonize outer space. They’ll have the same appetites, vices, and existential dissatisfaction they have now. They’ll make the far spaces they occupy look like those from home and fill them with people of different races and cultures and classes. The multiethnic fabric of the Cowboy Bebop universe includes blacks, Latinos, blonds, Arabs, radicals, country boys, and down-home female truckers all over the solar system.

The episodes vary wildly in theme, setting, and style from one to the next. The mood can change from farce to film noir to space combat to mushroom-induced hallucinations to painful flashbacks that reveal a character’s past. One never knows where the series is going or what tangents it will take, making each episode unpredictable. Nor do we always understand them. Things are left out; ellipses need to be filled in. But what’s important here is not the destination, but the journey, what we feel and experience along the way, whether in a Las Vegas–style space casino, a Hong Kong–style Mars colony, a hippie colony in a space junkyard, or a succession of bars, clubs, and battered spaces throughout the solar system, scattered in various desert towns and the ruins of Earth.

And then there’s the music. Instead of larding the soundtrack with a few cues and themes that are replayed over and over (as is often the case with anime TV scores) Yoko Kanno draws on all her considerable musical knowledge to come up with the right cue for every different setting and flashback, ranging from plaintive chorales during Spike’s fall from a cathedral window to the military dirge we hear during a flashback to a war on Titan, plus lots of blues guitar, harmonica, piano, and a jazzy opening theme with a hyperactive horn section that pumps viewers up and gets them in the mood every time. Cowboy Bebop would simply not be what it is without this score.

The spiritual antecedents of Spike, Faye, and Jet are pretty obviously Lupin, Fujiko, and Jigen from Lupin the 3rd, an earlier anime series that mixed comic capers, shootouts, chases, duplicity, and a jazzy opening theme. However, while Lupin and his partners are consistently cartoonish and engaged in constant slapstick, Spike and company’s fun and games are tempered by a gradual sense of the characters’ inner lives and complicated histories, a whirl of innocence lost, virtue betrayed, and unresolved conflicts. In fact, the tantalizing bits we get make us hungry for more. The separate tortured pasts of Spike and Faye finally start to come into focus in the final episodes. The romance that ought to grip them, however, remains elusive, even though Faye’s feelings finally burst out in the heart-wrenching two-part finale, “The Real Folk Blues.” Ultimately, the big difference is Bebop’s tragic, violent ending, which might throw some viewers for a loop, but helps make this series a work of art rather than just clever entertainment.

Composer Yoko Kanno’s mastery of musical styles informs every episode of Cowboy Bebop. She has has written numerous anime scores and is best known for her work on Macross Plus, The Vision of Escaflowne, Please Save My Earth, Turn A Gundam, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Wolf’s Rain, and the “Magnetic Rose” segment of Memories.

Megumi Hayashibara voiced Faye Valentine and is a popular singer and voice actress in Japan, having sung many anime theme songs and acted key roles in Ranma 1⁄2, Slayers, Macross Plus, Blue Seed, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Pokémon, Love Hina, and Shaman King, among many others.

The animated opening credits sequence, with its driving jazz theme and pulse-pounding action, is one of the most celebrated of such sequences in anime history. It reminds older viewers of secret agent movies and TV openings from the 1960s and also recalls Lupin the 3rd’s credits sequence from the 1970s as well.

In “Mushroom Samba,” there are literal side “trips” as Ed gives bad mushrooms from an illegal dealer to the hungry Spike, Faye, and Jet and then is joined by Ein in watching the hallucinatory effects—three amusing “stoned” bits, including Spike walking up a short, but seemingly endless, staircase and Faye “swimming” in a dry bathroom that she swears is filled with water.

The final episode offers a memorable—and heartbreaking—image: as Spike flies off, Faye stands there in the space dock firing her pistol up at the ceiling in frustration.

Cowboy Bebop ran on the Cartoon Network as part of the Adult Swim lineup, starting on September 2, 2001. Following September 11, three episodes, numbers 6, 8, and 22, were removed from the run, although they were all eventually shown in late 2001 or early 2002 and during repeat runs over the next five years.

Spike and Jet regularly watch a TV show aimed exclusively at their trade, entitled “Big Shots for the Bounty Hunters,” hosted by a black cowboy and his shapely, scantily clad blond female co-host. It recalls the “Chicks with Guns” video featured at the beginning of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997).

Episode 23, “Brain Scratch,” details the workings of a cult of people who want their souls to “migrate to electronics” and be free of their bodies, seemingly modeled on the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego, California, whose members committed suicide in March 1997 in the hopes that their souls would board a UFO that was supposedly following the then-visible Comet Hale-Bopp.

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001) takes place at a point near the end of the series and adopts an entirely different tone, becoming more of a straight thriller. With far more violence than the TV episodes, it leaves out the humor and laidback charm to place undue emphasis on a single villain, a terrorist who had once been a soldier, and who doesn’t generate anywhere near the interest that the bad guys in the series do. For a series with so much fun, it would have been nice if the movie had some, too.

violence Standard fight action, martial arts, and frenetic shootouts, with the requisite bloodshed, some of it quite profuse. profanity Frequent profanity in the subtitles and dub track. nudity Occasional semi-nudity, courtesy of Faye, usually in the shower. advisory Lots of cigarette smoking.