Cowboy Bebop: Awesome Action in only Twenty-Four Minutes

Game of Thrones and Homeland do it in 55 minutes, Firefly and Dr Who in 45 minutes, the episodes of Cowboy Bebop tell their stories in little under half an hour: 24 minutes to be precise. Its stories are wonderfully short and sweet, a brief and vivid slice of beautifully drawn life, and a quite delightfully spirited piece of animation.

In twenty-four minutes this television show tells a story packed full of action and adventure, humour, drama, intrigue and some romance. It does what longer films do but in less time, and with a lot less fuss; its brevity is brilliant! It is an astonishingly different and refreshingly irreverent show. It has a unique visual style, exciting theme music and pace.

The show’s titles are bold, and striking to behold, with a lively, energetic bebop-like jazz theme, which always fills me with excitement and anticipation of the episode to come. The ending theme wound down the episode and left me ready for the next one.

The show has quite an orthographic, technical style to its drawing, which suits its science fiction world to no end. The worlds themselves were always well realised, with great clarity, brilliant colour and an attention to detail that betrays a keen eye for observation in its animators. The characters are depicted in highly contrasting darks and lights especially for the titles where they are overlaid on vivid colours. Shown at quite a pace, these titles evoke the pace to come.

The regular cast are well drawn in line as well as in character. They all seem like individuals with nimble wits and sharp tongues and minds. The scenarios are all well conceived, nice and accurate, and precisely plotted to reveal just what was wanted and needed, but no more nor no less.

A thoroughly enjoyable, exciting, engaging and intriguing series of short films (as television is) all told in 24 mins. Superb.

Sword Art Online

Finished Sword Art Online: a quite beautiful, vivid and colourful world. It has an interesting premise that serves the story well, creating a brilliant fantasy world and one that is truly tense at times. It is a very good Japanese animated television show. It does go at quite a pace, but has moments of calm and thoughtfulness. There are a lot of surprises and unexpected moments in the plot and narrative, which kept me gripped.

The title sequence and theme tune always got the blood pumping, lifted the spirit to another realm and set the mood for the show very well. The end credits had a very intriguing song — according to the subtitles, which nicely wound down the episode. The art of the title and credit sequences are very well done.

The world of Aincrad was realised wonderfully with a well drawn, painted and animated environment and setting. The places visualised were colourful and vivid, a treat for the eyes. There was an interesting treatment of the game-play graphics which popped up at times appropriate to the story: when the story had them duelling players and bosses.

There was a story there that was engaging, with drama, action, some tragedy and humour. The story was about people getting trapped in a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game: an interesting, but potentially exclusive, premise. Yet it makes good use of the video games culture of its characters, and explains well, to the slightly-initiated, and potentially uninitiated, audience alike, making the hidden world of gaming more accessible in service to the story. It never felt like it was trying to be a game, or that the viewer was watching others playing a game. It was just the story of some people trapped and living their lives in a game, told well and with respect for the characters and their lives.