Review: Riding the "Riding Bean"

I had the opportunity to watch creator Kenichi Sonoda and director Yasuo Hasegawa’s Riding Bean (1989) for the first time through AnimEigo’s new Blu-ray and streaming edition of the OVA, so I’m taking the time to review my experience with the 49-minute classic and this new release.

Riding Bean is a fun piece of work. It’s like a quintessential car chase extended over the course of almost 49 minutes. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, it’s not a constant flurry of action over action, but it has to be said that it’s a great “vehicle” work, with so many gorgeous drawings of vehicles slamming into each other, driving around an American city, or just interior shots of characters talking from within them so you can fully appreciate the power of the layouts, all of this is happening with music by mainly composed by David Garfield playing in the background. It’s got some fantastic background art, I especially loved the smears over a lot of the driving scenes when the backgrounds aren’t fully animated on cels. This is a common technique, but it’s nice to show appreciation for it being done well. That’s a lot of words to say it looks good.

Of course, compliments of how good the OVA looks isn’t complete without taking into consideration the animation and drawings of the characters themselves. I’m not new to Sonoda’a work, I’ve experienced some of his other ventures into the anime medium during his time at studio Artmic, and he’s a unique artist even with my limited understanding of his work. Sonoda himself didn’t supervise the drawings for this particular OVA, but the animation directors and animators involved certainly kept the appeal of his characters alive.

Speaking of which, there are a lot of fascinating individuals who worked on this film’s animation: particularly, animation directors Atsushi Okuda, Masahiro Tanaka, and Osamu Kamijou; as well as supervisor and top key animation credit Shinya Oohira, who just last year animated a certain scene now-famous scene in One Piece (his first contribution to television animation in nearly 10 years). And let’s not forget key animators Eiji Suganuma, Satoshi Iwataki, Takahiro Kishida, so forth and so forth. That’s a lot of pretty talented people. As a side note, there’s one scene that I do want to give a little special attention to: one of the characters near the end of the film breaks the glass window of a car in two hits. The second hit is when it cracks and shatters, but the first hit doesn’t do a crack; instead, it looks like they had Toyohiko Sakakibara from Light Magic, who is credited for “airbrush work”, airbrush the window over the first hit, which gives it a foggy, beat-up look before the second hit breaks it. I couldn’t say how often such a technique was used in anime during this era, but it certainly caught my interest.

Narratively speaking, it’s exactly what I expected. That’s not to a detriment at all. It’s full of violence one might stereotype from this era (especially in regard to American films, which I would assume Sonoda took inspiration from given the setting) and has a classic cop-and-thief trope through Bean and Percy (I guess the easiest comparison to make is Zenigata and Lupin III). It does feel like a bit of a shame considering the nature of the work as a standalone OVA (even considering the 7 minutes of Bean Bandit that were crowdfunded by Sonoda and studio Creators in Pack that was released in 2021). For as cool as Bean is with his bulletproof jacket, bean-shaped face, and demeanor that hates seeing kids involved with the woes of people’s worst, there’s really only the 45-ish minutes of content to see all of that. Of course, there’s also a manga that was serialized around the time the OVA came out as well, and whatever else Sonoda has been up to with the characters (they briefly appear in Gunsmith Cats in altered versions), but it’s mostly been limited in scope.

If you’re thirsty for this kind of high-action set in an American urban city, I think you’ll enjoy it. Be wary of some contentious content, especially the violence and some nudity; but otherwise, it’s a fun time, and the release looks pretty good, as far as I’m concerned.

Anime Corner received a review copy of the Riding Bean Blu-ray release.
Riding Bean © AnimEigo