Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (2001)

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General		Extras
Category	Anime	Dolby Digital Trailer-City Main Menu Audio & Animation Featurette-From The Small Screen To The Big Screen Featurette-International Appeal - What's Not To Like? Featurette-Spike: A Complex Soul Featurette-Faye: Intelligent Vixen Featurette-Ed: Resident Eccentric Featurette-Jet: No Ordinary Dad Storyboard Comparisons-4 Biographies-Character-5 Gallery-Characters; Aircraft; Automobiles; Monorail; Accessories Music Video-Ask DNA Music Video-Gotta Knock A Little Harder Theatrical Trailer Trailer-Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis
Rating
Year Of Production	2001
Running Time	110:29
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (79:07)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4,5	Directed By	Shinichiro Watanabe
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Kτichi Yamadera Megumi Hayashibara Aoi Tada Unshτ Ishizuka Steve Blum Wendee Lee Melissa Fahn Beau Billingslea
Case	?
RPI	$39.95	Music	Yoko Kanno

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) Russian Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English Arabic Czech Danish Finnish Greek Hindi Hungarian Norwegian Polish Russian Swedish Turkish English for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, cigarette brands
		Action In or After Credits	Yes

    When a TV show spawns a movie, it can be an advantage not to have seen the TV show, or it can mean the film is incomprehensible. I like to approach the movie without having seen the series, first — I can always go watch the series and come back to the movie, if need be.

    It turns out that the Cowboy Bebop movie has been written to be accessible to people who haven't seen the series, but I'm guessing that fans of the series are likely to get more out of the movie.

    For those who haven't seen the series, let me explain a few things. If you're a fan, feel free to skip this bit (and try not to laugh). The Cowboy Bebop universe is set a decent amount of time into our future. Mars has been settled (I don't know about other planets). There's a certain element of lawlessness, and bounty hunters exist once again. A roving bounty hunter is known as a "Cowboy". Our heroes are a bunch of bounty hunters in their ship, the Bebop. Our motley band of heroes are:

• Spike Speigel — tall, skinny, expert at martial arts, and not bad with a gun
• Jet Black — heavier build, older, genius mechanic
• Faye Valentine — the obligatory female in skimpy attire who crops up in anime, but this time with some serious attitude, and as much a bounty hunter as the men
• Ed / Edward — a very thin girl who is an eccentric genius with computer systems and hacking
• Ein (short for Einstein, I think) — the Welsh corgi who doesn't play a big part in this movie

    We meet Spike and Jet as they break up a hold-up on a convenience store. Then we meet Faye pursuing a bounty on a young hacker who has stolen a tanker truck. With Ed's help, she finds the truck, but the sinister individual who alights is not the hacker she's looking for. Then the truck explodes, and everyone around it gets very sick with a mystery illness. Looks like Faye's target was the tip of something much bigger — how much bigger becomes obvious when the authorities offer a large bounty for the person or persons responsible for the truck explosion — the truck is being treated as a possible act of bio-terrorism (topical, no?).

    The Cowboy Bebop series is popular for a number of reasons, including the remarkable music, solid storylines, cinema noir approach, and the solid voice acting, both in Japanese and in English. All of this is carried over into the movie, with all of the people involved in the series performing the same functions in the movie. That's not gonna hurt.

    If you like the series, then you'll probably like the movie (it fits in around about episode 22 in the series timeline). If you don't know the series, then maybe the movie is a decent way to determine if you might like the series — I know I'll be looking into the series now.

Video

    This transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, with 16x9 enhancement (I like wide-screen anime). The original aspect ratio was 1.85:1, so this is more than acceptable.

    The image is, in a word, gorgeous. It's quite sharp, with no trace of film grain. Most of the time there's no low level noise — the only trace I noticed came around 70:13, for a short period.

    Colour is drawn from a slightly subdued palette, but that's part of the joy of this style — there are no garish primary colours, but plenty of deep rich shades to admire. There are no colour-related artefacts, and especially none of the notorious rainbows that can afflict anime in NTSC.

    There are no film artefacts worth mentioning. There are surprisingly low levels of aliasing or dot crawl — you'd expect more, given that each character is outlined in black. There's no obvious moire. There are no MPEG artefacts.

    There are subtitles in thirteen languages (an interesting selection), and we get both regular subtitles, and subtitles for the hearing-impaired, in English. I watched the hearing impaired set with the English dub, and the regular with the Japanese dub. Both are easy to read, and seem to fit the action fairly well. The timing seems fractionally on the late side when compared with the English dub, but there are possible explanations for that.

    The disc is single-sided and dual layered, formatted RSDL. The layer change is beautifully concealed — it's at 79:07, but you will have great difficulty finding it..

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There are three soundtracks, all of them Dolby Digital 5.1. I listened to all of both the English and Japanese, and sampled the Russian very briefly.

    The Russian soundtrack sounds like Russian dialogue dubbed on top of the English (you can hear the English in the background) — not a fully professional job.

    The English soundtrack is beautifully made. The dialogue is clear and comprehensible, and nicely matched to the mouth movements.

    The Japanese soundtrack sounds as clear as the English, but I can't judge if it is comprehensible. It's almost as well matched to the mouth movements as the English.

    One of the highlights of Cowboy Bebop is the extraordinary score from Yoko Kanno. The movie gets an awesome score, with a wide range of music styles, including some fabulous driving music for the big action scenes. There are some songs in the soundtrack, and it's interesting that they feature English lyrics.

    These soundtracks are 5.1, but if you have 6.1 EX matrix decoding, make sure it's enabled — the sound decodes superbly across the rears, including the rear centre. There's some marvellous sound, including dialogue, directed to the rears. Without a full 5.1 setup you're missing quite a bit of the experience.

    The subwoofer gets plenty to do, and it's a thrill.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    There is an impressive array of extras on this disc.

Menu

    The menu is a nice piece of design, looking like a heads-up display for a space flight game. It's well-animated, with music. It's no problem to navigate.

Featurettes

    We get a stack of short featurettes, each focussing on a particular subject. They feature interviews with the director, character designer, Japanese and English voice actors, and others.

• From small screen to big screen (5:44)
• International appeal — what's not to like? (7:03)
• Spike: a complex soul (7:21)
• Faye: intellectual vixen (6:38)
• Ed: resident eccentric (6:49)
• Jet: no ordinary dad (5:04)

Storyboard Comparisons

    These compare the finished scene side-by-side with the original storyboard.

• Scene 3: the virus (2:35)
• Scene 6: the Moroccan bazaar (4:22)
• Scene 15: Ed finds Lee (2:30)
• Scene 17: Spike confronts Vincent (5:50)

Character Bios

    Brief (two page) bios for the team on the Bebop:

• Spike Spiegel
• Jet Black
• Faye Valentine
• Edward Wong Han Pepelu Tivrusky the 4th
• Ein

Galleries — Conceptual Art

• Characters (40pp)
• Aircraft (39pp)
• Automobiles (20pp)
• Monorail (4pp)
• Accessories (9pp)

Music Videos

• Ask DNA (1:46) — as used in the opening credits
• Gotta Knock a Little Harder (3:53) — as used in the closing credits

Trailers

• Cowboy Bebop the Movie (1:52)
• Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis (1:35)

    The Region 1 version of this disc is scheduled for release in June 2003. I haven't found a review of it yet, but the list of features matches the disc we have (although the R1 lists only Japanese and English).

    Given how good the Region 4 version is, I doubt there's any call to buy the R1.

    Cowboy Bebop: The Movie is an enjoyable movie that expands on the characters fans know from the series. It has been given the deluxe treatment on DVD.

    The video quality is excellent.

    The audio is reference quality, with some of the best use of directional surround sound you'll hear.

    There are a lot of extras that will take some time to work through.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall