From the Rental Vault: Live + Animated

Every country and culture has its tried-and-true genre movies, which are often good frameworks to use for comedy. Mel Brooks used horror movies and Westerns to create Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. It doesn't always work, as Amy Heckerling found out when she made the gangster-film spoof Johnny Dangerously, or Sylvester Stallone when he made the gangster-film spoof Oscar, or Eddie Murphy when he made the comedy crime movie Harlem Nights. Some genres may work better than others.

Japanese moviemaking has a genre called jidaigeki, which usually refers to movies about the Edo Period between about 1600 and the mid-1800s. The warrior samurai frequently feature prominently in them, and Japanese directors have used jidaigeki as a comedy framework also, as Hiroyuki Nakano did in 1998's Samurai Fiction. The young son of a clan officer sets out to retrieve a sword stolen from his family by another samurai. Two of his friends come along to help, and the young man's father sends two ninja along to protect his son and keep him from dying at the hands of the much more skilled sword-thief. During his pursuit, the young man meets an aged samurai sword master and his young daughter, with whom he falls in love.

Nakano made his movie in black and white after the usual pattern of jidaigeki films, but included an updated rock and roll soundtrack and random illustrative color splashes (red fills the screen when someone is killed, for example). He is heavily influenced by Quentin Tarantino as well as great Japanese moviemakers, with the title itself calling to mind Tarantino's 1994 Pulp Fiction. But the plot is cluttered enough to flatten the laughs, relying more on punchlines and sight-gags than on humor built into the story the genre's own absurdities. It might make for enough laughs, but they're not very lasting, and neither is Samurai Fiction.

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Current internet culture has a big place for anime, or Japanese animated television series and movies, but that art form's exposure was a lot more limited in 1998 when Sunrise Studios and director Shinichirō Watanabe began making the sci-fi/Western/noir/crime drama Cowboy Bebop. Bebop, in fact, played a large role in raising the profile of the genre from kid's movies or gross underground stuff to actual adult entertainment.

Enough so that in 2001, Watanabe also created Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door (retitled Cowboy Bebop: The Movie in the U.S. to avoid lawsuits), a feature-length adventure of the bounty-hunting crew of the spaceship Bebop in the late 21st century.

The explosion of a tanker truck on a busy Martian highway has killed hundreds, but the perpetrator can't be found. Authorities issue a fantastic reward for his capture, which draws interest from Spike, Faye and Jet, especially because the guy they were already chasing was supposed to be driving the tanker. A chemical company responsible for the deadly substance spread by the explosion has dispatched their own agent to try to track down who's responsible, and her path will cross the bounty-hunting "cowboys" of the Bebop. It'll probably take them awhile to warm up to each other.

Watanabe wanted to create a movie that kept the feel of his series but took full advantage of the longer time available as well as the bigger budget. He mostly succeeds, with a fighter-plane chase and a mano-a-mano bout between Spike and the villain standing out as some absolutely amazing animation -- especially when you consider that it was all hand-drawn.

Bebop the movie keeps some of the series' flaws -- characters tend to monologue a bit much and Faye's got a costume and figure straight out of some middle-schooler's sketchbook. But it also keeps its strengths -- literate, layered, well-done and with people who seem real even though they, even more so than most movie characters, are just images on a screen. It's easy to see why this movie and TV series helped the art form not just open the door, but kick it in and snap off a few shots as well.