Cowboy Bebop: The Movie opened in Japanese cinemas on September 1, 2001, and a 4K remaster of it returns to screens in Japan on October 30, 2026.2 The next day, back in 2001, the TV series went out as one of the launch shows of Adult Swim in the United States.1
Shinichiro Watanabe's 26 sessions about broke bounty hunters have sat on best-anime lists ever since. They also sit on lists about dubs, openings, soundtracks, fights, finales and space operas, and on one list no show wants to be on.
Sixteen rankings take Cowboy Bebop apart into Yoko Kanno's score, Steve Blum's Spike, one final duel and a Netflix remake, and each part carries a different reputation.
Cowboy Bebop vs Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, the best anime ever
Is Cowboy Bebop the best anime ever? The ranking that asks it outright sets the 1998 series against 14 others, from Dragon Ball Z and Neon Genesis Evangelion to Frieren, which started airing in 2023.
Bebop's case rests on critics more than on episode counts. Anime Insider put it first on its 2007 list of the 50 best anime, and Japan's Seiun Award, voted by science-fiction fans, named it the best media work of 2000.1 It did that in 26 sessions, a fraction of the length of the long-running shonen series beside it.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood has the strongest claim on the critics' side: 64 episodes that adapt the whole of Hiromu Arakawa's finished manga. Brotherhood offers a complete, planned story. Bebop offers mood, music and episodes that work on their own.
Akira vs Cowboy Bebop: influence outside Japan
The 13 most influential anime of all time measures reach rather than quality. Cowboy Bebop shares the list with Astro Boy, Akira, Sailor Moon, Pokemon and Spirited Away.
Akira changed things in 1988, when Katsuhiro Otomo's film showed Western audiences that animation could be adult, violent and lavish. Bebop arrived ten years later and proved something narrower: a TV series could borrow from jazz, film noir and westerns and still read as anime.
Its route to influence was the American TV schedule. Adult Swim launched with it in September 2001, which put a Japanese series made for adults on a US cable network every week.
Evangelion vs Cowboy Bebop: the late-1990s pair
Top 20 anime of the 1990s puts Cowboy Bebop beside the decade's heavyweights: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Berserk, Serial Experiments Lain, Princess Mononoke and the Ghost in the Shell film. Bebop belongs to the very end of the decade, with its full run airing on WOWOW from October 1998 to April 1999.1
Evangelion is the natural opponent. Hideaki Anno's 1995 series turned a giant-robot show into a study of depression and closed on an ending fans still dispute. Bebop went the other way, with almost no robots and a cast that refuses to talk about its past.
Trigun and Outlaw Star, two more 1998 space westerns, sit on the same list. Bebop was not the only show of its year to put gunslingers in orbit.
Dragon Ball Z vs Cowboy Bebop on Toonami
The 31 best anime that aired on Toonami covers both lives of Cartoon Network's action block: the original run from 1997 and the Adult Swim revival that began in 2012. Dragon Ball Z defined the first. Cowboy Bebop was part of the second from its opening night.
When Adult Swim brought Toonami back on May 26, 2012, the first night's schedule put Cowboy Bebop in the 2:30 a.m. slot.3 It was by then a 14-year-old series in a lineup of newer shows.
Dragon Ball Z holds the older claim: it joined Toonami in 1998, a year after the block launched, and it is the title most tied to the original era. Bebop's claim is different: it was already a late-night fixture on Adult Swim years before the revival.
Watanabe's later work fills three more slots. Samurai Champloo, Space Dandy and Lazarus all aired on the block.
Steve Blum's Spike: Cowboy Bebop and the best English dub
Which anime has the best English dub is a question American fans settle among themselves, and Cowboy Bebop is on it for its cast. Steve Blum voiced Spike Spiegel, Wendee Lee played Faye Valentine and Beau Billingslea played Jet Black.
Blum played Spike low and tired, which suits a character who jokes his way through every fight.
Trigun is the frame's neighbour, with Johnny Yong Bosch as Vash the Stampede in another 1998 space western. Dragon Ball Z, Hellsing Ultimate, Baccano! and Space Dandy fill out the list, which means Watanabe's work appears on it twice.
Tank! vs Guren no Yumiya: the greatest anime openings
Top 12 anime openings of all time ranks songs, so Cowboy Bebop appears as Tank!, the big-band instrumental by Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts. Of the twelve openings on the list, it is the only one with no sung lyrics, just a spoken count-in and a horn section.
Guren no Yumiya, Linked Horizon's 2013 opening for Attack on Titan, is its opposite in the frame: German-language chanting over orchestral drums. One sets a mood for a show about drifters; the other announces a war.
Cha-La Head-Cha-La, A Cruel Angel's Thesis and Again complete a field of openings from three different decades.
Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts among the greatest anime soundtracks
The 14 greatest anime soundtracks of all time ranks whole scores, and Cowboy Bebop's belongs to Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts, the band she put together for the show. Its music moves through bebop, blues, country and heavy rock, sometimes inside a single episode.
Spirited Away faces it in this frame. Joe Hisaishi wrote the piano and orchestra score for Hayao Miyazaki's 2001 film, which took the Oscar for animated feature in 2003.
Samurai Champloo is on the same list, so Watanabe's two best-known series compete on music as well as story.
Four bounty hunters and a corgi: the Bebop crew as an anime team
The 14 best teams and crews in anime includes the four bounty hunters and one corgi aboard the Bebop: Spike, Jet, Faye, Ed and Ein. They are a strange fit for a team list, because the show's running joke is that they barely work together.
The Straw Hat Pirates are the opposite case. Eiichiro Oda's crew has grown episode by episode since One Piece began airing in 1999, and loyalty is the whole point of their story.
Team 7, the Survey Corps and Team Rocket fill out the list. The Bebop crew holds together for 26 sessions and then scatters, and the ending depends on that.
Spike vs Vicious and Naruto vs Sasuke: anime's greatest fights
The 10 greatest anime fight scenes of all time includes one gunfight: Spike Spiegel against Vicious, his former partner in the Red Dragon Syndicate, in the last session of Cowboy Bebop. Vicious fights with a katana, Spike with a pistol.
The duel is short and nearly silent next to the others on the list. Goku vs Frieza on Namek stretched across many episodes of Dragon Ball Z, and Naruto vs Sasuke at the Valley of the End closes Naruto Shippuden after years of build-up.
Spike vs Vicious lasts a few minutes. It earns its place through what rides on it.
Toshihiro Kawamoto's suits: Cowboy Bebop's character designs
Which anime has the best character designs gives Cowboy Bebop credit for the look Toshihiro Kawamoto drew: long limbs, loose suits and near-realistic proportions. JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is the opposite pole, with Hirohiko Araki's poses taken from fashion photography and classical sculpture.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes vs Cowboy Bebop: building a solar system
Which anime has the best world-building usually rewards maps and magic systems, as One Piece, Made in Abyss and Hunter x Hunter show. Cowboy Bebop's world is smaller and dirtier: a solar system settled after a hyperspace-gate accident shattered the Moon, with Earth still under falling debris in 2071.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes builds two interstellar states, with parliaments, fleets and admirals, across 110 episodes of a video series released from 1988 to 1997.
Cowboy Bebop as space anime: commuting between moons
Top 18 space anime of all time runs from 1974's Space Battleship Yamato, known to American viewers as Star Blazers, to The Orbital Children in 2022. Cowboy Bebop is set in 2071 and moves between Mars, Venus, Ganymede and Callisto, where people commute between moons and run out of money.
Yamato is the epic version of space: a resurrected battleship on a voyage to save Earth. Planetes, a 2003 series about debris collectors in low Earth orbit, is the list's other working-class space story, and the closest thing Bebop has to a cousin here.
Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Gundam and Macross supply the war stories. Bebop and Space Dandy give it its jokes.
Cowboy Bebop vs Samurai Champloo: Shinichiro Watanabe's best
What is the best Shinichiro Watanabe anime sets Cowboy Bebop against the rest of its director's work. The list holds eight titles, from Macross Plus, which he co-directed in 1994, to Lazarus in 2025.7
Samurai Champloo is the closest rival because it repeats the Bebop method in another setting: Edo-period Japan instead of 2071, and hip-hop by Nujabes and Fat Jon instead of jazz.
Watanabe's newer shows keep reaching American viewers first. Space Dandy debuted on Adult Swim's Toonami in January 2014, in step with its Japanese premiere.4 Lazarus premiered on Toonami on April 5, 2025, with action sequences designed by John Wick director Chad Stahelski.5
Kids on the Slope, Terror in Resonance and Carole & Tuesday complete the eight: a jazz drama, a bombing thriller and a music story set on Mars.
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm vs Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
What is the best animated movie based on a TV series is mostly an American list: The Simpsons Movie, South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. Cowboy Bebop: The Movie, titled Knockin' on Heaven's Door in Japan, is one of two anime films among its 15 options, with Pokemon: The First Movie.
The film is set between sessions 22 and 23 of the series, so it adds one more case to the crew's run instead of continuing past the ending.1
The frame's opponent is Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. The 1993 film grew out of Batman: The Animated Series, and like the Bebop film it stretched a TV show into a darker, cinema-length story.
The Real Folk Blues vs Death Note: anime's best series finales
The 20 best anime series finales of all time includes Cowboy Bebop's two-part ending, The Real Folk Blues, in which Spike leaves the Bebop to settle things with Vicious and the Red Dragon Syndicate.
The ending is remembered for what it leaves open. Spike walks down the stairs, points a finger gun at the syndicate men below, says "Bang" and collapses, and the series never confirms whether he dies.
Death Note closes the opposite way: Light Yagami's plan falls apart in a warehouse, and Ryuk writes his name. Steins;Gate, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Code Geass R2 are on the list too, along with The End of Evangelion, the film that gave Evangelion a second ending.
Netflix's Cowboy Bebop vs Ghost in the Shell (2017): the worst live-action adaptations
What is the worst live-action anime adaptation is the one list where a Cowboy Bebop entry is there for the wrong reasons. The entry is Netflix's 2021 series, with John Cho as Spike Spiegel, Mustafa Shakir as Jet and Daniella Pineda as Faye.
Netflix released all ten episodes on November 19, 2021, and cancelled the show within a month. TVLine reported the cancellation on December 9, citing The Hollywood Reporter.6
Its company here includes Dragonball Evolution, Death Note (2017) and Ghost in the Shell (2017), the Scarlett Johansson film criticised for its casting and for flattening its source.
Yoko Kanno came back to score the Netflix series. The one part of the remake made by the original team was the music.
Why Cowboy Bebop keeps splitting into parts
Across these sixteen rankings the pieces of Cowboy Bebop have separate reputations. Kanno's score and Tank! sit on music lists, Blum's Spike on dub lists, the last session on finale lists, and the Netflix remake on the worst list of all. Every one of them points back to the same 26 sessions from 1998.
Each ranking on this page is decided one pair at a time, through the bracket visible in the screenshots, and how a bracket compares with full pairwise voting explains what that format catches and what it misses.
A show with the same spread across categories can get its own ranking here in a few minutes, and other fans will sort it.
More rankings, more angles
- Evangelion: Most Influential Anime of All Time? 14 Fan Rankings — Anno's robots, depression and two endings
- Is Death Note the Best Anime Ever? Where It Lands on 15 Lists — a thriller filed as a cartoon
- Studio Ghibli vs Disney: Which Studio Is Better? 15 Lists — Miyazaki, the Oscars and 1990s rivals
Sources
- Wikipedia — Cowboy Bebop: 26 sessions, WOWOW broadcast October 1998 to April 1999, Adult Swim premiere on September 2, 2001, Seiun Award 2000, Anime Insider's 2007 list, the film's place between sessions 22 and 23: en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-21)
- AniTrendz — Cowboy Bebop: The Movie 25th anniversary visual and 4K remaster screenings in Japan from October 30, 2026; original release September 1, 2001: anitrendz.com (checked 2026-10-21)
- Anime News Network — Adult Swim's Toonami block returns, schedule for May 26, 2012: animenewsnetwork.com (checked 2026-10-21)
- Cartoon Brew — Space Dandy debuts in January 2014 in both the US and Japan: cartoonbrew.com (checked 2026-10-21)
- AniTrendz — Lazarus debuts April 5, 2025 on Toonami; action sequences by Chad Stahelski: anitrendz.com (checked 2026-10-21)
- TVLine — Netflix cancels Cowboy Bebop after one ten-episode season, December 9, 2021: tvline.com (checked 2026-10-21)
- Wikipedia — Shinichirō Watanabe: directing credits from Macross Plus (1994) to Lazarus (2025): en.wikipedia.org (checked 2026-10-21)