Cowboy Bebop (1998), produced at Sunrise under director Shinichirō Watanabe and composer Yoko Kanno, is one of the most internationally praised anime TV series. Its mix of jazz score, episodic structure, science-fictional Western frame, and visual quality unusual for its budget made it the anime most easily recommended to non-anime viewers through the late 1990s and 2000s.
Production
Cowboy Bebop was produced at Sunrise as a 26-episode TV series, originally broadcast on TV Tokyo from April 1998. The production was deliberately released in late-night blocks for older audiences rather than children's-programming slots. Director Shinichirō Watanabe, character designer Toshihiro Kawamoto, and mechanical designer Kimitoshi Yamane assembled the production at a level of visual ambition unusual for a TV series of its era.
Yoko Kanno's score
Composer Yoko Kanno produced the series' jazz and blues score with her studio group Seatbelts, recording substantial live ensemble performance rather than synthesised music. The score's commercial success — the soundtrack albums sold in numbers normally reserved for pop releases rather than anime soundtracks — and its frequent placement at the centre of the series' episodes (some sequences function as music videos as much as story scenes) made the music inseparable from the series' identity.
International reception
Cowboy Bebop's 2001 broadcast on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block was many American viewers' first exposure to a Japanese animated series aimed at adults. The series is widely cited as the work most responsible for establishing adult-audience anime in the American TV market, ahead of the Crunchyroll-era streaming boom. The 2021 Netflix live-action adaptation was received poorly and cancelled after one season.