• Bean Bandit and his voluptuous friend, Rally, are professional getaway drivers. In the first scene we are already exposed to Bean’s badass nature as he chases a bunch of robbers down in his custom Porche chassis (with Corvette ‘Stingray’ machinery)! Bean is invincible—he gets caught in a hail of bullets, has a searing hot frying pan placed on his face, and even gets shot in the head without much damage! The most that ever ails him is the shot to the skull gives him a cross-eyed, Looney Toons expression for a couple of minutes but, then, he’s perfectly fine!
• Bean is a bonafide, badass, manly man to an absurd degree. It’s never actually revealed why Bean is immortal—maybe he’s has a cyborg body, maybe he’s Frankenstein’s monster, but the OVA is so captivating that the audience doesn’t really care, he’s just Bean. Speaking of impossibilities, the car physics and functionality are absurd. In an interview, Ken'ichi Sonoda claims that all of the high tech gadgetries in Bean’s car were feasible at the time of the manga’s release (1988) but it would be a stretch to say that those car mechanics would be possible now, thirty years later!
• After being duped by a malicious master-of-disguise, Semmerling—it is revealed that the kidnapping of the child of the Grimwood estate, was actually just an excuse to abduct her father, Mr. Grimwood, and use him as a hostage. This leads to an intense, high-speed chase: Bean chases after Semmerling in her BMW 750iL, while Percy (the police chief, more or less a carbon copy of Zenigata from Lupin III) chases after Bean in his 1967 Shelby Cobra GT-500KR. At the beginning of the film, Percy brags, like a doofus, about his badass car but then it gets utterly destroyed in the car chase! His sensible sidekick, Dick, is just a passenger to Percy’s absurd shenanigans. Finally, Semmerling realizes that she can’t beat Bean (even if she runs him over with a car) and accidentally kills herself (via immolation). Mr. Grimwood and his daughter are reunited, Semmerling’s sex-trafficked sidekick is finally free, and it’s a happy ending.
• The level of coolness is intensified by the swooning blues soundtrack that the OVA breaks out during its intense moments; there are A LOT of them, Bean’s car is even shot with an anti-tank rifle! The animation is incredible for its time, the animation of the bullets hitting the cars, the POV shots of the highway, and dynamic tech tricks with Bean’s Porsche were out of this world! The pacing is great, every moment is exciting, especially in the last half!
• Overall, this OVA is a wild ride: thrilling, a visual spectacle that everyone should watch at least once. I think that Bean was stronger as a protagonist than, the other, Rally from Gunsmith Cats but Sonoda has admitted that Bean was ‘a guy [that he] could identify with much more personally.’ Fortunately, there was a ‘Bean Bandit Project’ officially announced on May 18th, 2018—that is purportedly going to be a sequel to Riding Bean! This OVA is definitely a gem, I rate it a 7.5/10.
• NOTE: I watched the Riding Bean with the original Japanese audio. I have seen a lot of negative comments about the English dub, so it’s probably best to avoid it.
