Much of it is just the same as the TV show, of course, but I was expecting a 90 minute movie with a 45 minute plot stretched desperately to try and fill feature length.

Cowboy Bebop, The Movie
Script/Story: 6
Acting/Characters: 6
Action: 7
Humor: 5
Eye Candy: 7
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7.5

This is the feature-length (over 2 hours) movie version of the popular Anime show. I own one DVD collection of the half hour TV shows, and have seen parts of several others on the Cartoon Network.

I was surprised by this movie. I like the TV show, sort of, but since those 18 minute episodes are often pretty slow in parts, and the animation and action is just mediocre, I didn't think the transition to feature length film would go that smoothly. It's far from perfect, with too many slow parts filled entirely by music and shots of downtown scenes, and the plot is a bit insane and full of logical holes near the end, and like all anime it regularly goes out of its way just to show cool things. But overall, it's a good story, has the good characters from the TV show doing the same stuff they always do, has good action, decent dialogue, and all the other stuff you want in a movie. The animation is substantially improved from the TV show, there is an excellent soundtrack, the characters grow do some things they've never done on the TV series, and the story is bigger than the TV episodes, and that's what I was most worried about.

Of course the animation and special effects and such will be improved, when they've got the time to really work on it and the budget to do more frames per second of animation. I was just worried that they'd have another minor bounty hunting plot, with a bunch of silly subplots tacked on, or some dumb, manufactured inter-character conflict. "Spike and Jade really get into a big fight, which they of course manage to work out just in time to team up and save the day, returning us to exactly where we left off before the movie." That's not the case, and though the characters all do their usual stereotype actions, it's what the fans expect. You've got to cover the standards, and then grow from there. Imagine if a Simpsons Movie came out and Homer never said "D'oh!"? The fans would hate it.

I strongly recommend this movie to anyone who is a fan of the series, since it's a lot better than any 4 or 5 episodes of the TV show. I was surprised how long it was; I figured it would sneak in at 83 minutes or something like that, and kept checking the DVD time counter in surprise when the plot didn't wrap up, and the time ticked past 1:30, then 1:40, then 1:50. I don't recall the exact running time, but it was over 2 hours. So you certainly don't get cheated on the length.

You do get a bit cheated on the plot when it becomes totally silly in several ways towards the end, and a bit of intelligence could have kept it from degenerating so far, but that only takes a point or so off of my scores. It gets a bit too philosophical, but it's not as spaced-out bizarre mind-trip as a lot of other famous Anime, such as Akira or Ghost in the Shell. There's enough good action and animation to prop up the replayability score, though it's not something I'm going to watch every six months just for the awesome action sequences, ala Ninja Scroll.

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