Riding Bean

Sometimes one of the cruelest things in the world of anime is when something has so much promise that you want it to see it be successful, but yet you have to endure the fact that you only get to enjoy just one episode of something that could of been so much more. This is pretty much the case of Riding Bean where the viewer only gets to enjoy one 45 minute ova episode of the adventures of Bean Bandit and his partner Rally Vincent. However, for as unsure as it may be - it's better to get something in the world of anime instead ... of nothing and thankfully what we did get is something incredibly enjoyable but it unfortunately leaves you wanting more.

The best way to sum it up is it's literally an animated episode of Miami Vice or Knight Rider that ignores the rules of syndicated television and is willing to show a little bit of nudity and some over the top violence. There is even some creepy lolitaism throughout the entire adventure. The funny thing is that these things come across very unexpectedly because within the first 5 minutes of the anime OVA your going to see some nudity and see people get killed in a brutal unapologetic fashion. It's almost jarring in a way because from the promotional art and trailers you get this impression that your in for a fun action based anime but you totally expect it to be PG, but instead you get something that is willing be a little bit ultra violent but it actually works.

Riding Bean focuses on the story of Bean Bandit and his accomplice Rally Vincent who are couriers for hire that accept a simple escort mission that unexpectedly turns into an elaborate kidnapping plot in which all hell breaks loose and it's up to Bean Bandit and Rally Vincent to survive the onslaught of cops and bad guys that go out of their way to either capture or even try to kill them while Bean and Rally try to determine who is pulling the strings and who is the true ringleader in this kidnapping plot.

It's a plot that you've absolutely seen before in any typical action movie or syndicated police show but the anime still manages to keep things fresh by keeping you guessing on how the plot will proceed and the true ambition of why a simple escort mission turned into being framed for a kidnapping while finding out the true motivation of why this situation happened to begin with. Everything does have this generic feel to it with regards to the mindless action set pieces and the elaborate car chases. No matter how generic it may be - it still retains a simplistic charm to it. The main characters are likeable and despite the short length of the OVA the good guys have their time to strut their stuff and the bad guys have their time to show how truly cruel and vindictive they are.

There are some brief moments of humor mostly from the the police Lieutenant Percy Bacharach who is deeply obsessed with trying to catch Bean Bandit by any means necessary even if it means wrecking his super powered muscle car in the process. One thing I will give this anime a lot of a credit is there is a lot of animated detail put into the car that Bean Bandit drives, but there is even a lot of animated detail put into the muscle car that the police lieutenant drives as well. I often feel like the vehicles that are placed in this anime have to be a little polished because the best action scenes throughout this short little ova involve some sort vehicular madness.

The animation is on par with what you would expect out of anime in the late 1980's to early 1990's. The characters are animated beautifully and regardless if certain scenes take place in the day or night the art matches the setting that the anime tries to present. The music is overall nothing too memorable but it's adequate for the scenes that it's presented in.

Overall, Riding Bean is adequate little adventure from Bean Bandit that pretty much ticks a lot of boxes if your looking for a typical police chasing outlaw story. It's serviceable but doesn't really do a lot to set itself above other anime that tries to do these types of story-lines. Unfortunately it is a little bit inferior to Gunsmith Cats, but I feel like you can only do so much in a 45 minute adventure and maybe if Riding Bean had a few more episode it would of scored a lot higher.

The simplest way for me to summarise my thoughts on Riding Bean is by utilising two comments made by Sanoda on the commentary track for this piece, paraphrasing: 'I was very particular about the timing of the grenades [detonating four seconds after ignition]', and 'many of the shots were an excuse to include things I had always wanted to do'. The point being: the staff involved may have been meticulous (as much as time and budget would allow), but the plot was a bit of a loosely constructed experiment that doesn't make for an extraordinary work, just a decent one.

Regarding the thought and details that ... went into certain areas: Lots of reference images were used from Chicago for the environments; models and images for the guns and vehicles; professional musicians from America recorded original music; the (Japanese) voice cast was well outfitted; the animation is mostly standard for the time but of good quality, with certain car scenes and other details receiving a great deal of attention, but...

it's mostly a cliched, referential action flick whose runtime is too short, that at times strays too far into the absurd (Just to name a few, this title references Rambo, the Terminator, Dirty Harry, The Blues Brothers, The Driver, Star Wars, and Gone in 60 seconds).

This really needed to be made into a fully fledged film or series, but it is essentially just a pilot episode for a show that never was to be, and due to various unfortunate events like licensing and ownership issues of now defunct companies, the material was recycled and repurposed into Sanoda's other works, namely Gunsmith Cats.
In places, things aren't adequately fleshed out and really require additional development or certain plot advancements happen rather expediently, but they couldn't possibly be otherwise because the runtime is only 46 minutes. For example: the relationship between the detective, Percy, and our protagonist, Bean, receives mostly superficial treatment; or like Bean, with prophetic coincidence only seen in film, happening upon the getaway vehicle of the antagonists.
We, as an audience, never truly get to know our characters. Taking Bean and Percy again, we know by the end that one is an outlaw and scoundrel but not evil, the other a gruff and aggressive detective, and that they have an ongoing rivalry involving cars. In other words, we know about as much about them as when they were introduced. Each performs his duty in the story well enough, but are mostly superficial representations of one trope or another.
One of the more interesting characters is the primary antagonist. It was still a little unusual, in America at least, to see a cold, calculating, sociopathic *lead* female villain in animation/film (The film Misery wasn't even out yet). The character with the most potential growth for future works was perhaps Carrie, 'the girl that the villain formerly kept', a former lover and sufferer of Stockholm syndrome, to put it euphemistically.

To stop this silly review getting really out of hand I'll leave it there. Despite all of my nitpicking, I actually still had fun watching Riding Bean and enjoyed it for what it was; it would just be unreasonable to claim it is legitimately really good. I just looked at some of the silliness and funny details (like Bean eating pineapple with the skin on) and ignored the critical part of my brain for a while.

What I initially thought would be an Ender’s Game porno turned out to be a ridiculous eighties action story with healthy doses of blood, cars, and pedophilia to appeal to every possible demographic. Riding Bean was the precursor to my last review, Gunsmith Cats, and even contains Rally Vincent as a secondary character. But unlike Gunsmith Cats, Riding Bean kind of sucks.

In what I assume is Chicago, Bean is a courier who, along with his partner Rally, get framed for kidnapping a young girl while the actual kidnappers take her father hostage and steal the ransom money. In a fit of testosterone laden action, Bean ... takes out his anger on the actual kidnappers, a woman and an eleven year old girl.

What’s instantly noticeable is the violence is a lot more graphic than Gunsmith Cats, somewhat pointlessly too. We’re given to believe that this is going to be a show focusing on shoot-outs but by the end of the forty-five minute episode, Bean is basically using sheer strength to lift cars and wears bulletproof everything to keep him invincible. As usual, the godliness of the main character means the action has no drama to it and instead comes across as silly. So the earlier, realistic violence is cast aside for the cartoonishness of Superman.

But it’s not just the action that’s silly. The music is pure eighties cheese, the kind of background noise you’d expect in Commando. Then there’s the dialogue, which is pretty awful, and the voice acting, which is bad too.

A moment of terrible dialogue comes with the maid service from the loli who gives the kidnapped father a hamburger and asks if he takes mustard with it. American maids are cool! But then she decides to suck his dick which he doesn’t take too kindly to. He slaps her away and she takes a knife threatening to cut his dick off. To which he responds that a little girl shouldn’t do that! If the anime had just been this forty-five second scene, it would have been a perfect ten for giving me a good laugh.

Bean himself is like a Schwarzenegger character. He’s ultra-strong, can’t be defeated, and has the speech capacity of Austria’s favorite son. As for Rally, she’s not at all like her counterpart in Gunsmith Cats and suffers from being too one-dimensional.The bad guys and other characters are not even slightly memorable.

What this adds up to is an unintentionally funny show that’s God-awful in nearly every regard aside from the animation. Riding Bean is stupid, underwhelming, and you won’t benefit from a viewing.