Amazon.com Video Essentials206205
Each of the snazzy 25-minute installments from the most popular Japanese animated TV series of 1998 is a satisfying adventure tale about a futuristic hipster bounty hunter. This is an elegant action-comedy anime, with smoothly integrated CGI space-flight elements, gorgeous graphics, blues harmonica and sax riffs on the soundtrack, and a no-sweat post-Tarantino attitude. Despite occasional eruptions of gun-fu Asian-action violence, and some intimations of heavy-duty drug use (in the first of 26 episodes, one especially noxious narcotic is administered as an aerosol spray straight onto the user's eyeballs), the tone is surprisingly convivial. None of the generic tough elements are grim or mean-spirited. Lanky antihero Spike Spiegel is a planet-hopping freelance hunter with an ex-cop sidekick named Jet, a loopy fellow hunter named Faye, a teenage computer hack, and a genetically enhanced Welsh corgi assistant in tow. The emphasis is on clever twists of plot in an episodic short-story format with as many wisecracks as punches being thrown. Unrated (suitable for ages 13 and older): violence, nudity, profanity, alcohol and tobacco use, occasional ethnic stereotypes.
--David Chute
Additional Features
Both a popular and critical favorite,
Cowboy Bebop offers a gritty, stylish vision of a dystopian future seen through the eyes of bounty hunter Spike Spiegel. The boxed set includes brief interviews with several production artists, including director Shinichir Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, and composer Yko Kanno. They all say they were trying to make something different, but Watanabe talks in greater detail about the difficulties of creating a world that no one has seen before but that must look as if people live there. An added bonus is the audio CD with 17 of Kanno's jazz pieces from the soundtrack (the composer also plays keyboards). The music sometimes takes on a 1950s brassiness, but more often subsides into a melancholic evocation of the series's alienated hero. An excellent gift choice for anime fans. Unrated (suitable for ages 13 and older): violence, nudity, profanity, alcohol and tobacco use, occasional ethnic stereotypes.
--Charles Solomon
輸入版DVDは日本国内用のDVDプレーヤーでは再生できない可能性があります。リージョンコードについてはこちらをご確認ください。
