It is very hard to find animes with such great quality nowadays, whether in history or even in art . I watch animes like Shingeki no Kyojin in and I think, " What kind of crap is this ? " . Besides the terrible stories , animations are bad and lazy.
I had never seen an anime with so much adrenaline and with a dose of perfectionism as big as this anime.
Influenced by an amount of things, like jazz movement in the early 40's (?), to noir cinema, Nouvelle Vague, philosophy and even religious themes and samurai laws, Cowboy Bebop's animations flow naturally . You do not feel like everything is mechanized or robotic , even when scenes are repeated numerous times to save the work of animators, wich is hard to see in an anime with so much to say and so little time to show.
And speaking of work, I had never seen a soundtrack as flawless as Cowboy Bebop. A jazz music with influences from rock, pop, classical music and even bossa nova or gypsy music.
The story is about a group of bounty hunters , as you may already know and is told in "closed episodes", which is not very attractive . It was not, it is not and it never will be.
However , the trump card of the story are it's characters. They are strong and I do not speak of their physical size, but their personalities. None of the characters in Cowboy Bebop are typical anime cliches (like Goku or Luff) , nor are predictable and lacking charisma ( like the characters in Shingeki no Kyojin ), they are striking, original and unpredictable. You never know if Spike will lift your opponent or take shoot him in the middle of his forehead .
It is no exaggeration to say that Cowboy Bebop is one of the most influential anime of all time, next to Akira, the films of Hayao Miyazaki and, why not , Akira Toriyama ?
Cowboy Bebop opened Western's eyes to action animes, aimed at an older audience, who were satisfied with comics like Sandman, Allan Moore's comics and among others, and influenced all sectors of our artistic side of the world, since cinema, to comics, music and even literature.
You can find influences from Cowboy Bebop in mainstream films such as Tarantino and Matrix, to underground artists like Dawn of Midi and even King Krule .
Sure Cowboy Bebop was also very influenced ( Lupin III and the movement of jazz are just some of the more obvious influences), but it was the mastery in uniting all these references (musical, artistic, visual, literary, phylosophical and religious) that make this anime the best anime of all times , in the humble opinion of this fan .
