Cowboy Bebop: The Movie

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Cowboy Bebop: The Movie

Japanese DVD Cover
Directed by Shinichiro Watanabe
Written by Hajime Yatate (story), Keiko Nobumoto (screenplay)
Music by Yoko Kanno & The Seatbelts
Distributed by Bandai
Release date(s) Japan 2001
United States 2003
Running time 115 min.
Language Japanese, English
IMDb profile

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (カウボーイビバップ 天国の扉 Kaubōi Bibappu: Tengoku no tobira?), also known as Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on heaven's door, is an anime movie which follows the Cowboy Bebop anime series. The movie's plot involves the release of a mysterious virus into the center of a large city and the Bebop crew's attempts to claim the obligatory huge bounty (300 million woolongs) associated with the capture of the villains behind the virus' release. The movie's theme is to answer the question: "Are you living in the real world, or is what you are seeing just part of a dream?"

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Contents

[edit] Characters

Spike Spiegel (left) with Faye Valentine.
Spike Spiegel (left) with Faye Valentine.
Main article: List of Cowboy Bebop characters

[edit] Spike Spiegel

Main article: Spike Spiegel

Spike is a freelance bounty hunter influenced by Bruce Lee, who is very adept with a gun and the hand-to-hand martial arts combat style Jeet Kune Do. He is also a very gifted pilot. He is prone to sleep, almost to the point of hypersomnia, but only when there is nothing else to do. He is a heavy smoker. His attitude is usually introverted, relaxed and careless.

Many of his decisions are based on his little known past. He lost his right eye in an "accident" (though technology has allowed it to be replaced), and seems to have had problems with love, and as a result, he seems distant at times.

[edit] Faye Valentine

A hot-headed freelance bounty hunter, and one of the five members of the ship Bebop. She is short-fused, rash, and through these qualities, she finds herself in difficult situations most of the time. Like most of the crew, she is a heavy smoker. Her position in the movie is somewhat of a subordinate, her significance lying mostly in her exposure of Vincent's plan.

[edit] Jet Black

Jet Black
Jet Black

He is at times a kind of father figure for the rest of his crew. He is the owner and the captain of the Bebop. Jet is somewhat of a renaissance man and also a heavy smoker. Jet's role is also somewhat of a subordinate as well; he expresses this through his complaint of his partners behaving any way they wish without taking him into account. He plays a vital role in stopping Vincent's plan, though.

[edit] Ed (Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV)

A strange young girl that serves as the hacker among the crew. Ed is the one to expose the truth about Vincent, and also discovered that the virus is, in fact, nanotechnology.

[edit] Ein

Ein is a "data dog" that mostly follows Ed. He is the one to notice that their enemy is a man named Vincent Volaju. Although he appears to be a generic Welsh Corgi, he is actually extremely intelligent, and is able to do many things that normal dogs cannot, such as playing shōgi and hacking into websites using a brainwave interface.

[edit] The Three Old Men

Another recurring motif of the series, these old men (named Antonio, Carlos and Jobim after Antonio Carlos Jobim) appear without certain relevance to the plot. They appear in three scenes; first, they refuse to give Spike information about the virus, second, they attend to Jet's plan of vaccinating the city before Vincent strikes, and third, in the credits, flying above the city. These three refer to a very famous bossa nova artist Antonio Carlos Jobim, who composed "The Girl from Ipanema".

[edit] Bob

An old acquaintance of Jet's from his ISSP days. Bob is the one to inform Jet of the stolen medicine from a crashed space truck that belonged to Cherious Medical.

[edit] Vincent Volaju

A scene from Cowboy Bebop: The Movie.
A scene from Cowboy Bebop: The Movie.
Vincent Volaju
Vincent Volaju

The main villain of the movie. Vincent is a rather melancholic introvert. He was used as a test subject during the experimentation after the Titan War. He was the only survivor in a field of test subjects, ergo, the vaccine only he carried was successful. He was abandoned to die on Titan by the government, but somehow survived and returned to civilization. He has also loved Electra very deeply, but has suffered amnesia from his ordeal and does not remember. His plan is to release the virus throughout the world, leaving only a handful of survivors. As a side-effect of the virus, Vincent was driven to insanity; which was also aided by the hallucination of golden butterflies he saw continuously (another side-effect of the infection). Vincent is in many ways a contrast to Spike. Aside from equal physical strength and similar physical appearances, Vincent and Spike are both men who consider themselves to be "dead" due to tragic incidents in their pasts, both kept alive by their love of a woman. The archetypal comparisons between the two have lead many fans to argue that the film itself is merely one of Spike's dreams, in which he confronts the guilt of his past and the end of his own life’s situation. Watanabe has declined to deny or confirm this. It has been stated that he may have been inspired by Bob Dylan and that his look is based on Vincent Gallo.

Electra Ovilo
Electra Ovilo

[edit] Electra Ovirowa

Also a soldier during the Titan War, Electra is a beautiful young woman who clings onto her past. Her love towards Vincent caused them to have a short-term relationship, during which Vincent transferred the vaccine to Electra. It is never explicitly said how Vincent got the vaccine inside Electra. She encountered Spike in Cherious Medical, and as a joke, Spike asked her for a date ("Let's flip a coin. Heads, I tell you (what I'm doing here), tails we go on a date"). Afterwards, Spike helped Electra to get back at Vincent and stop him. Her appearance is based on that of Gina Gershon.

Rasheed (left)
Rasheed (left)

[edit] Rasheed (Doctor Mendelo al-Hedia)

His first appearance is as an apparently ethnic Arab man who carries a cigarette lighter shaped like a grenade with him, and also knows an awful lot about "beans". It is later revealed that Rasheed is Doctor Mendelo, who developed the nano-machinery that was to be used as a virus for the military, vaccinated Vincent in attempt to keep it under control, and destroyed all evidence of the vaccine, but was unable to destroy the data of the virus itself, fleeing to the Arab Quarter where he lived on as a drug dealer.

[edit] Lee Sampson

A teenage hacker that has become Vincent's accomplice due to his enthusiasm in being a terrorist. He was the bounty that Faye had been searching in the beginning of the movie, and he was later on killed by Vincent, due to the reason: In the end of the game, only one can win. He is very interested in video games from the 20th century, as shown by him playing an alternate version of Pac-Man in a car while talking to Vincent.

[edit] Voice actors

Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (US-Region 1 DVD Edition).
Cowboy Bebop: The Movie (US-Region 1 DVD Edition).

Japanese voice actors are written first, followed by English voice actors.

[edit] Adult Swim Broadcast

Ratings
Australia:  M
Brazil:  16 anos
Canada (Brit.Col):  14A
Canada (Alberta):  14A
Canada (Manitoba):  PA
Canada (Ontario):  AA
Canada (Maritime):  14
Canada (Quebec):  13+
Denmark:  7
Finland:  15
France:  U
Germany:  FSK-16
Hong Kong:  IIB
Ireland:  15
Japan:  PG-12
Mexico:  B-15
New Zealand:  M
Norway:  15
Singapore:  NC-16
Sweden:  15
Taiwan:  R-12
United Kingdom:  12
United States:  R

On Saturday, September 3, 2005 at midnight and 3:00AM, Adult Swim broadcasted Cowboy Bebop: The Movie with a TV14 rating for violence. However, there were still some cuts in the TV broadcast:

  • The movie was broadcast in fullscreen rather than the original letterbox format. Apparently, Adult Swim broadcasted the syndicated version of the movie, as distributed by Sony, the producers of the film in Japan.
  • The film's title was the original Japanese title: Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door. In all other English-language versions the film is simply Cowboy Bebop: The Movie.
  • The movie's end credits were displayed in Japanese rather than in English. Also, the video part of the credits were sped up, with the audio at normal speed, like all movie broadcasts. As such, the entire ending song, "Gotta Knock a Little Harder", and Spike's reprisal of the opening line were not heard.

In order to conform to broadcast standards, other edits that were made include:

  • Spike's "And you take too long to take a shit!" is changed to "And you take too long to take a crap!" Sony used the "crap" spoken from Spike's previous line, "Don't pull that Art of War crap on me!"
  • The pan shot of Faye in the shower is cut, though only her silhouette is seen through the shower curtain. In the same scene, while Faye talks to Ed on the phone, the camera zooms in to avoid showing cleavage.
  • The man on the monorail being shot in the head is cut so no bullet impact is seen.
  • Vincent shooting Spike through the chest is cut.
  • The police chief's "Shit!" was muted out.
  • Another shot of the police chief saying "Shit!" was cut.
  • The scene of Vincent shooting Spike through the side of his stomach on the tower is cut.

[edit] Trivia

This article contains a trivia section.
Content in this section should be integrated into other appropriate areas of the article or removed, and the trivia section removed.
  • The film was never successfully submitted for an Oscar. In 2002 it was turned down for the Academy Award for Best Animated Picture (winner: Shrek) on the grounds that it had not been released in the United States in the previous year. It was resubmitted in 2004 (winner: Finding Nemo), after its American release, and was turned down that year because it had not been produced in the previous year.
  • Even though the film was released after the conclusion of the TV series, the movie's story runs concurrent with the series and is placed between episodes 22 and 23 since Faye, Ed and Ein are still part of the Bebop crew. Moreover, one can see Cowboy Andy (Musashi) from Session 22 "Cowboy Funk" in the parade. The show "Big Shot" is still running. The three old men, one of whom was shown as being dead in the "Brain Scratch" episode, are also present.
  • At the opening of the movie the audience sees Spike sleeping but never actually wake up. This, among numerous other references to dreaming has led speculation that the events of the film are actually all a dream of Spike's. In the series, Spike speaks of being able to see patches of reality, but never the whole picture and frequently mentions that he cannot tell if he is living in a dream.
  • Similar to the dream theory, numerous references suggest a similarity between Spike's past and Vincent's character. Prominent examples of this similarity include (but are not limited to) the identical marble scene at the beginning of the movie and after the credits roll, similarities in clothing/appearance between the two characters, and dialogue spoken by Spike exclaming he "shares the same soul" with Vincent. This possibly suggests Spike is confronting a bizarre, dark form of his "past self" (as characterized by Vincent) in his dream.
  • Vincent talks about whether in reality he is dreaming about the butterflies; or the butterflies are real and he is dreaming about reality. This refers to the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, when he dreamed that he was a carefree butterfly flying happily. After he woke up, he wondered how he could determine whether he was Zhuangzi who had just finished dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly who had just started dreaming he was Zhuangzi.
  • The theme of the movie has reference to Descartes's dream argument where there is doubt about the existence of the external world. He says there is no way to prove if he is dreaming or sleeping, because senso-perception is always unreliable. In the same way, Vincent with his brain damaged by the nanomachines could not tell the difference between the real world and his own distorted world.
A scene that was cut from the Adult Swim broadcast.
A scene that was cut from the Adult Swim broadcast.
  • This is the first (and currently, only) time that voice actress Jennifer Hale has been involved in an anime dub, although she has been involved in dubs for many Japanese video games, one of which is Metal Gear Solid. In a recent interview, she has stated that voicing Electra in this movie is one of her favorite experiences.
  • It is one of the few examples of a film which received an R rating for violence in the USA, but only a 12 certificate in the UK.
  • The final shoot-out from the western Shane is used as the movie playing in the background at the drive-in movie theatre as Jet Black receives information from Bob.

[edit] Theme songs

Opening
Ask DNA by The Seatbelts featuring Raj Ramayya
Ending
Gotta Knock a Little Harder by The Seatbelts featuring Mai Yamane

[edit] External links

Cowboy Bebop
v • d • e
Characters | Episodes | Cowboy Bebop: The Movie | Manga | Bountyheads

Music: The Seatbelts | Yoko Kanno | Cowboy Bebop (album) | Vitaminless | No Disc | Blue | music for freelance | Ask DNA | Future Blues | Cowgirl Ed | Box Set | Tank! THE! BEST!

Misc: Red Eye | Woolong | Cowboy Bebop (PlayStation game) | Cowboy Bebop (PlayStation 2 game)
The Works of Shinichiro Watanabe
v • d • e
TV series: Macross Plus | Cowboy Bebop | Samurai Champloo
Films: Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
Short films: A Detective Story | Kid's Story | Baby Blue
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