Cowboy Bebop: 26 Sessions of Noir, Jazz, and Outlaws Who Never Fit In

Cowboy Bebop is a Japanese neo-noir space Western anime that aired on TV Tokyo and Wowow from 1998 to 1999. Sunrise created and animated it. It ran 26 episodes, which the show called “sessions,” and it has been called one of the best animated series ever made. It earns that.

Trailer, via Crunchyroll Dubs.

A Bounty Crew Aboard the Bebop

The setting is 2071. An accident with a hyperspace gateway left Earth almost uninhabitable roughly fifty years earlier. Humanity moved out to the rocky planets and moons of the Solar System. Crime rose. The Inter Solar System Police set up a legalized contract system: registered bounty hunters, called “Cowboys,” chase criminals and bring them in alive for a reward.

Spike Spiegel and Jet Black work that trade from a spaceship called the Bebop. Spike is an exiled former hitman of the criminal Red Dragon Syndicate. Jet is a former ISSP officer. Faye Valentine, an amnesiac con artist, joins them. So does Edward Wong, a child hacker, and Ein, a genetically engineered Pembroke Welsh Corgi with human-like intelligence.

The crew keeps losing money. That is the running joke and the running sadness.

Watanabe, Nobumoto, Kanno

The production team was director Shinichirō Watanabe, screenwriter Keiko Nobumoto, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, mechanical designer Kimitoshi Yamane, and composer Yoko Kanno, billed together as Hajime Yatate.

Watanabe built each character as an extension of himself or as his opposite. He wanted the crew flawed. He gave Spike an artificial eye for that reason. Producers vetoed his original plan to give Spike an eyepatch. Kawamoto designed the cast so each one could be told apart at a glance.

The voice cast carries it. Koichi Yamadera plays Spike. Unshō Ishizuka plays Jet. Megumi Hayashibara plays Faye. Aoi Tada plays Edward.

Spike, Vicious, and Julia

Much of the show is episodic. The main arc belongs to Spike and his rivalry with Vicious, a ruthless criminal of the Red Dragon Syndicate. The two were once partners and friends.

Then Spike began an affair with Vicious’s girlfriend, Julia, and resolved to leave the syndicate with her. Vicious tried to eliminate Spike by blackmailing Julia into killing him. Julia went into hiding. Spike faked his death. In the present, Julia comes out of hiding and reunites with Spike, intending to make their planned future a reality.

The series draws most heavily from science fiction, Western, and noir films. It explores existential boredom, loneliness, and the inability to escape one’s past. Every main character is defined by loneliness or resignation to fate.

A Gateway Series That Still Holds

Cowboy Bebop was a critical and commercial success in Japan and abroad, most notably in the United States. It won several major anime and science fiction awards. Critics and audiences praised its style, characters, story, voice acting, animation, and soundtrack. The English dub is regarded as one of the best anime dubs ever made.

Here is the schedule as it ran.

The show is credited with introducing anime to a new wave of Western viewers in the early 2000s. That is why people call it a gateway series.

The soundtrack is the part that has aged best. Kanno’s score moves through jazz, blues, and rock without ever sounding like a novelty. It is not background music. It sets the tempo of the whole thing, and the show knows it.

The English dub matters more than it should. A bad one would have buried this in the West. Instead it is one of the reasons the series traveled so far.

What holds up is the refusal to fix anyone. Spike does not heal. Faye does not recover her memory in any way that helps her. Jet does not stop being cynical about the society he left. The show gives them each other, briefly, and that is the whole consolation. Brian Camp and Julie Davis compared the main cast to Lupin III’s, but only on the surface, because these people have more troubled pasts and more complex personalities.

Twenty-six sessions, one season, no arc that overstays. The episodic detours are the point, not the padding: they show a crew that cannot settle anywhere, doing a job that barely pays. The Vicious arc lands because the show spent so long showing you what Spike had instead of a past.

Cowboy Bebop is not a nostalgia pick. It is the rare series that earned its reputation on craft — direction, design, score, and a cast of outlaws who never fit in. It is a 10 of 10.

Anime · classic anime · Cowboy Bebop · Shinichiro Watanabe · Space Western · Yoko Kanno