In a market crammed full of dross, here's a show that will restore you faith in anime after so many disappointments; a series you'll want to drag your non-fan friends to see. This is one of the hippest, most idiosyncratic offerings to come out of Japan in a long time. The show drips cool from the moment the credits open in a blare of big-band horns, split-screened in a pastiche of every great early Seventies show you've ever loved. And then it just gets better and better.
| Hero Spike Speigel, voiced by Koishi Yamedera, is a rakish, gangly man with a shock of untidy hair - a laid-back space cowboy. His bounty-hunting partner, voiced by Unsho Ishizuka, goes by the nom de guerre of Jet Black, a big ex-cop with a bionic left arm. Their roving base of operations is the heap-of-junk spaceship Bebop, and the pair of them appear to be constantly close to the breadline. There's a moment of recognition when we realize Spike is forever paying damages out of his earnings. Oh, he's one of those bounty hunters.
 | But this is a future noir and, like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Spike is the last romanctic hero in a dog-eat-dog world, with a line of snappy dialogue that wouldn't seem out of place in a Forties B-thriller. Spike has that quality rare to animated characters: charisma. He's proof that skilled creators can get a performance out of a drawing.
Spike lives in the late 21st Century, in a solar system long colonized by mankind.
This is a milieu dominated by a Chinese outreach into space, and despite the multicultural setting, the visuals are heavily influenced by the creatvie team's love of Hong Kong. The series designers have created a richly textured retro-futuristic backdrop, in which the Martian colony enclaves look like Chicago crashed in Kowloon. It's a world of sharp division between rich and poor, a land of poverty that drives people to crime, and makes bounty hunters a living.It's a background so thoroughly thought through that the viewer doesn't need to question the premises that underpin it.
| Cowboy Bebop relies for much of its charm on this ability to create a sense of place. It's no coincidence that the success of this is also due to one of the other great elements of the series. Composer Yoko Kanno produces on of the her best soundtracks yet. As ever, she mixes up styles and genres higgledy-piggledy, from blues slide guitar to jazz, R&B, drum & bass, funk, pop and ballads. The style shifts don't jar, but only emphasize how thoroughly well-realized Cowboy Bebop's noisy, madcapt multicultural milieu is.
 | Take all these elements - characters, setting and music - glue 'em together, and you would still end up with a shapeless mess if it wasn't for the tightness of the stories and direction. Episodes are finely paced, with an eye to both action and the more mellow sequences. Again, the love of Hong Kong cinema comes through in the stories, from quotations of Bruce Lee's kung fu philosophy (in 'Waltz for Venus') through Spike's limber martial arts style (in Asteroid Blues'), to shoot-outs in the style of John Woo's Hard Boiled. This show is part thriller, part cowboy movie, part kung fu flick. And in space. What more could you want?
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