Composed of 1 season with 26 episodes, Cowboy Bebop is an anime I absolutely love from the late 1990's. It's a genre of Japanese animation that has sadly been long forgotten; drowned out among fan-service and an era of merchandising.
Cowboy Bebop is entirely self-aware; it takes pride in how unique and artistic it is. It may just be a story of a group of outcasts coming together to be life-on-the-edge bounty hunters, but it displays this world and set of characters as western-like, with smooth jazz accompanying the action as if their work was a form of art.
Its universe holds similarities to various stories within science-fiction. It's a blend of William Gibson's 'Neuromancer' and Mamoru Oshii's 'Ghost in the Shell', with its own western themes added in. Its colour palette is toned, gritty, and shows signs of wear throughout time. This is a universe that has peaked and is in a slow decline. Crime is forever evident through drugs, crime syndicates, and prostitution.
The season starts off introducing these characters to us--their backgrounds all completely different--as we see them come together and claim bounties in an anthology-like manner, careless and just letting life take them wherever; although it changes once we learn more of Spike's past, and how it's slowly coming back for him. The first few episodes slowly set things up for this narrative, with minor moments that reference his past as a criminal in a large syndicate, and how he faked his death in order to escape with a woman he loved.
Everything neatly leads up to a conclusion that has become famously known within Japanese animation, reminding us that we're "... going to carry that weight" of the past into the future.
