GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO COWBOY BEBOP

A lonely song plays on a music box. Rain falls in darkened streets, and a red rose wilts in a blue-hued puddle. Fade to black and the trumpets blare, their staccato spikes accented by flashes of black-and-white English text. Colored panels slide and split across the screen in true retro fashion. Afroed silhouettes puff cigarettes, guns fire, and feet dance to the jazz as the credits appear.

You aren't watching a seventies cop show or classic film noir. You're watching a late-nineties Japanese animated television series called Cowboy Bebop. Sure, it feels familiar, but that's because it has a little bit of everything: retro feel, jazzy soundtrack, John Woo- and Robert Rodriquez-style gunplay, episodic postmodern storytelling, war film-style dogfights, blaxploitation parody, soul-searching bounty hunters, cold-blooded killers, undying love, and the mysteries and constraints of the past. Oh yeah, and did I mention the spaceships, warp gates, planet colonization, and asteroid-pelted Earth? Cowboy Bebop takes place in the future, so I suppose it's science fiction on top of everything else, but this is one show that refuses to be shoved in the little black box called "genre."

Cowboy Bebop follows the lives of a group of bounty hunters--ex-Mafia member Spike Spiegel, ex-cop Jet Black, gambling addict amnesiac Faye Valentine, crazy computer genius Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV (Ed for short), and the super-intelligent Welsh Corgi, Ein. Together, they pursue their bounties, sometimes failing, sometimes succeeding, and together they deal with their hidden or forgotten pasts. Each episode is like a piece of a puzzle; on their own they're interesting enough, but if you put enough of them together you see something larger, deeper, and perhaps more authentically human than anything else out there. The show is pure entertainment on the surface, and remarkably easy to get into, but it is deeper than it seems; it makes you laugh and it makes you cry, it helps you forget about the world and then recreates that world in front of you, and at times it goes straight for the soul.

If you like action, science fiction, westerns, film noir, character-driven plot, quick pacing, smooth animation, or jazz/blues/rock music, I guarantee you'll like Cowboy Bebop. If you think animation is only for children, and is not a challenging and diverse art form that rivals and often exceeds that of live action film, I'd urge you to give Cowboy Bebop a chance. It's an experience you won't likely forget.