COWBOY BEBOP: THE MOVIE

released OUT NOW! 2001 | 12 | Blu-ray & dVd (dual format) Director shinichiro Watanabe Cast Koichi Yamadera, Megumi Hayashibara, Unsho Ishizuka

Nearly 20 years after its debut, Cowboy Bebop remains a favourite among anime fans. Following shambolic bounty hunters in a retro-future space-opera, it’s violent, cool, farcical, ironic and tragic. The series is on Blu-ray already; this is the subsequent film, a new adventure set before the final TV episodes.

The original series often took place in space, but the film is grounded in a “Martian” city that’s the spitting image of New York. (Bebop loves to pastiche old action movies; the film’s central chase scene evokes The French Connection.) The story’s about a deranged terrorist armed with killer nanomachines; Bebop’s disengaged outsider hero, Spike Spiegel, feels kinship with him.

It’s watchable if you haven’t seen the series, though it’s satisfying to see how it builds on it. Beyond that, it’s a broadly enjoyable, sumptuously made film that suffers from major bloat. The story is fine, but many slack scenes should have been compressed or cut. Its indulgent showboating actually makes it harder to care about the visually dazzling showdown on a tower which ends the film.

Extras Six short featurettes, mostly on the characters (39 minutes); storyboard comparisons for four scenes; concept art galleries; a trailer. Andrew Osmond