Riding Bean

Riding Bean is a fast paced OVA with a competent narrative and excellent animation. Only clocking in at 46 minutes, it is impressive how much was able to be crammed in. The OVA is mostly non stop action featuring car chases and shootouts but does spend some time to develop some character motivations. The animation is well done and does not feel dated. The music fits well within the setting and makes the overall experience more enjoyable. The only real detractor is that some of the characters are not as well fleshed out as the others but should be expected ... due to the runtime. Riding Bean is a good OVA that is enjoyable to watch.

“Riding Bean” is, for the most part, an enjoyable watch. With a 46-minute runtime, it delivers an intriguing plot with a decent, yet open-ended conclusion, and doesn’t overstay its welcome or get stale. The character designs are nice to look at, the animation and voice acting are decent, and the all-English soundtrack is pleasant. It takes place in Chicago, which is kind of unusual for an anime, and that, paired with the music, gives this OVA a distinctly “American” feel that only a few other anime I’ve seen have managed to accomplish.

Similar plots have been done before, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to ... see it play out, with all of the colorful car chases and gunfights, the larger-than-life antihero protagonists, and wacky twists and turns. The villains are a bit “too” evil, though, which kind of tempers my enjoyment of the OVA and gives me tonal whiplash. The main villain, in particular, can be hard to watch; she is manipulative, and gaslights and abuses the young girl working with her.

There is also a fair amount of unnecessary fanservice that has nothing to do with the plot, and it seems kind of forced in there. And we also get a scene where the young girl working with the main villain offers to “help” a man they kidnapped use the bathroom, which is disturbing.

Since this is just a one-shot OVA, the characters’ backgrounds and motivations are barely explained, and I’m left with more questions than answers. For instance, why is Bean so strong that bullets bounce off of him? Why are he and Rally partners, and why exactly do they do what they do? Are they criminals? They live in a big city with such a distinctive car, so why do the police have trouble finding them? How do the villains’ disguises work so well? Why does Bean stuff a bunch of nuts into his mouth before he goes on a vehicular rampage? Things like that.

Overall, although the villains’ actions, meaningless fanservice and lack of background hamper this OVA, it’s a fun “America-in-an-alternate-universe”-style action romp that is worth a watch.

What I initially thought would be an Ender’s Game porno turned out to be a ridiculous eighties action story with healthy doses of blood, cars, and pedophilia to appeal to every possible demographic. Riding Bean was the precursor to my last review, Gunsmith Cats, and even contains Rally Vincent as a secondary character. But unlike Gunsmith Cats, Riding Bean kind of sucks.

In what I assume is Chicago, Bean is a courier who, along with his partner Rally, get framed for kidnapping a young girl while the actual kidnappers take her father hostage and steal the ransom money. In a fit of testosterone laden action, Bean ... takes out his anger on the actual kidnappers, a woman and an eleven year old girl.

What’s instantly noticeable is the violence is a lot more graphic than Gunsmith Cats, somewhat pointlessly too. We’re given to believe that this is going to be a show focusing on shoot-outs but by the end of the forty-five minute episode, Bean is basically using sheer strength to lift cars and wears bulletproof everything to keep him invincible. As usual, the godliness of the main character means the action has no drama to it and instead comes across as silly. So the earlier, realistic violence is cast aside for the cartoonishness of Superman.

But it’s not just the action that’s silly. The music is pure eighties cheese, the kind of background noise you’d expect in Commando. Then there’s the dialogue, which is pretty awful, and the voice acting, which is bad too.

A moment of terrible dialogue comes with the maid service from the loli who gives the kidnapped father a hamburger and asks if he takes mustard with it. American maids are cool! But then she decides to suck his dick which he doesn’t take too kindly to. He slaps her away and she takes a knife threatening to cut his dick off. To which he responds that a little girl shouldn’t do that! If the anime had just been this forty-five second scene, it would have been a perfect ten for giving me a good laugh.

Bean himself is like a Schwarzenegger character. He’s ultra-strong, can’t be defeated, and has the speech capacity of Austria’s favorite son. As for Rally, she’s not at all like her counterpart in Gunsmith Cats and suffers from being too one-dimensional.The bad guys and other characters are not even slightly memorable.

What this adds up to is an unintentionally funny show that’s God-awful in nearly every regard aside from the animation. Riding Bean is stupid, underwhelming, and you won’t benefit from a viewing.