![]() ![]() Basically just like you'd anticipate from an episode of a show designed to be watched in any random order, which this mostly was, so I'm not sure why it impresses me so.Īt any rate, this opening will end up informing basically nothing that happens for the rest of the movie's 115 minutes, so its purely mechanical function is hard to deny, but it doesn't remotely feel like that in the middle of watching it. And just like that, we have most of the important information we'll need from the show, all in a context that plays much more like a suspense sequence than a scene of exposition. Knockin' on Heaven's Door, as scripted by Nobumoto Keiko (who, like virtually everybody involved in the film's production, was part of the production staff of the show) opens with a scene perfectly calibrated to introduce the basics of the concept to people who hadn't watched the series while easing fans back into the vibes of this most vibe-driven of properties: in a convenience store nowhere in particular, a couple of criminals have been caught by a couple of bounty hunters, familiarly called "cowboys" in this setting: Spike Spiegel (Yamadera Koichi) and Jet Black (Ishizuka Unsho), the former of whom is callously cheerful, the latter of whom is obviously alarmed, even scared, by the Spike's impetuous, hotheaded decision to shoot the last crook even as he was holding an old woman hostage. As an episode of Cowboy Bebop, it's towards the bottom of my list, which certainly says more about the level the series had established for itself than it does about the movie. Taken on its own terms, this is a very impressive piece of animation and sci-fi worldbuilding, telling its gloomy story of a man-made end-times through some wonderfully expressive visuals and increasingly heavy atmosphere. ![]() On the contrary, I think the movie has been crafted to be a very fine, comprehensible standalone object (to be fair, so were a good 75% of the show's episodes), and I might even go so far as to say that I think it might benefit from being watched that way. The first thing to say about the 2001 Japanese animated feature Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door (generally released in the West merely as Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, to avoid any possible scuffles with Bob Dylan's people) is that it inevitably lives in the shadow of the 1998-'99 Japanese animated television series Cowboy Bebop, though I don't think that should be any disincentive to see it. A review requested by Morgan, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.ĭo you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page! ![]()
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