COWBOY BEBOP
Dir. Shinichiro Watanabe
Starring: Beau Billingsea, Faye Valentine, Melissa Charles

A new chapter has been written in the book of animated film, providing a neat antidote to the oh-so-saccharine offerings that Disney and Pixar are pumping out to destroy each other with. Projects like ‘The Animatrix’ and more recently, ‘Cowboy Bebop’ show that the animated film genre does not have to have an immediate plastic toy tie-in or appeal to the lowest common human intelligence in order to achieve permanence.

Cowboy Bebop is a thinking film with lofty aspirations, peppered throughout with the kind of technological “Aha!” that we only recently saw in Minority Report. It’s Mars, 2071AD and from the immaculately crafted opening sequences, it looks a little like New York. Hip-hop artists bounce happily on street corners next to hobos who munch hotdogs and beat policemen look bored. It all changes cataclysmically.

A petrol tanker explodes on one of the main motorways deep in the city releasing an unspecified bio-agent that kills hundreds before dissipating leaving no trace. Not that the city is worried about the spread of viruses (‘We eradicated that problem fifty years ago’) but the threat of unspecified terrorism attacks endures as Halloween draws near.

Caught up in the madness are four bounty hunters – there are three billion throughout known space – who are down on their earnings and see the astronomical reward as a neat solution to their problems. The leader is po-faced but cheeky chappy with immeasurably long legs and a good aim. His partner is an ex-cop with bionic enhancements. Their associate is a young woman squeezed into the tightest space-briefs/bra combination you can imagine – (think basketballs in cling-film). Backing them all up is a weird 12 year-old girl who acts as their hacker/information resource and the film’s most obvious humour valve. They’re not here to save the world, just earn the cash.

The story careers wildly from one inconvenience to the next as the four chase The Mysterious Geezer to resolve their problems. He doesn’t have the luxury of much originality: ex-army, secret government research lab, now throwing bio-toys out of pram. But he is an incredibly gifted martial arts dude –which is why you sit through two-hour Manga films.

The action – and there are five distinct bits – is stunningly choreographed by the same people as ‘The Animatrix’; one recognizes Multipunch and Twist-O-Kick from the same ‘arena’. There’s a great flying-car scene, which is totally ‘G-Force’ from the seventies (the musical score is weird –jazz meets country meets porno music). But in these hand-to hand sequences, time does NOT slow down and the backgrounds DON’T go weird, and when the two collide, it ISN’T in a screaming huge ball of white plasma. Instead, it’s very real and very quick. I raised eyebrows several occasions considering its generously low 12A rating.

However it’s either the failing of the translation or overambitious scriptwriters but the philosophical angle to this film is too linear and obvious, like a drunk at a dinner party. It wants to mess with our heads, but instead we nod out of sympathy because it tried very hard.

Visually, this film is an absolute winner. Its strong Akira-esque city setting makes for darkly pleasant viewing, mixing Far East with Middle East and Ultra West. The CGI keeps the strong design anchored firmly to the action, by exploiting the separation between cartoon world and ‘real space’ in a way that ‘The Hulk’ will never truly understand. I’d recommend it as a great hangover movie. In the meantime, I’m off for a self-preparing bowl of noodles before a jet-race round a giant holographic Hello Kitty somewhere downtown.

words: Rufus Sanders