Cowboy Bebop

Since its release in 1998, Cowboy Bebop has became a cult hit, setting a new standard for animes in general. Basically this means that it is a must-watch anime! The style is unqiue, with an overall feel of “west”, about more than half of the songs are english.

Don’t let the name fool you, the movie has almost nothing to do with cowboys, except that in the future, bounty hunters are also called cowboys. Bebop is actually the name of the old ship that the main characters live on.

The animation quality is above average, the style kind of reminds me of Ghost in the Shell. It steers away from the usual anime stereotype somewhat, aimming for a more realistic feel instead.

Serious plot development takes place in every episode, with around 1/5 of them centering around the “real” core plot and the rest to develope the characters. There are 26 episodes in total, with a 27th clip show (recap episode) that was released later. Speaking of episodes, all of them are named after songs, including one called “Bohemian Rapshody”, a song that is amoungs my favourites. The plot also moves away, like most great animes, from the stereotypical good vs bad, black vs white storyline. And the ending was quite sad…sigh…they always HAVE to do that…Evangelion…Nadesico…all sad endings, ok Eva does not have a really sad ending, it had a WTF? one, but it was sad most of the way through. X_x

Oh yah! The storyline actually involves Singapore in the later part! It is an important place to ONE of the main characters. You can see the Merlion. ^_^

There is also a Cowboy Bebop movie that I have not watched yet. It is called “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” which I assume is another song name.

Final Score:
9.3/10
You can’t really compare this anime to others, since as it itself said, it is the anime that “went and created a new genre by itself”.