Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, known in Japan by the much better name Cowboy Bebop: Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, was released in 2001 and takes place during the show’s final handful of episodes.
In Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, the gang are unwittingly sucked into a bio-terrorism plot, forced to stop the evil Vincent Volaju before he unleashes a deadly storm of nanobots on Mars.
Every episode of Cowboy Bebop gives you the tiniest glimpse into what makes each character tick, and in the movie, that glimpse widens into a window through which we are allowed to see the characters as never before.
Blum’s referring to one of the movie’s quieter moments in which he’s stuck in a prison with Elektra Ovirowa — voiced by the Commander Shepard, Jennifer Hale.
“When I was younger, I wasn’t afraid of anything,” Spike says to Elektra in the movie.
“It was the first time that he really got vulnerable,” Blum says, crediting that moment as the deepest and most open Spike ever is.
Think of the genius that’s in the beats of storytelling in the way Bebop delivers the story.
Cowboy Bebop the series was recorded separately and disjointedly, with the actors coming in solo to record their scenes, one by one.
“And the moment was fairly brief compared to the exposition for a lot of the other characters,” Blum continues.
Twenty-two years after the show’s release, Netflix is launching a live-action adaptation along with making the original anime available on its streaming platform The only reason I was able to rewatch the movie myself was because I still had a physical copy that I made my father buy from a Blockbuster the day it was released.