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“Cowboy Bebop: The The Shield Seasons 1-7 DVD Box Set” (Image), the 2001 big screen spin-off of the zippy Japanese TV action comedy, drops the scrappy crew of galactic bounty hunters into more sobering surroundings: bioterrorism, forbidden nanotechnology, a military conspiracy, and a madman with apocalyptic designs he plans to unleash on the teeming Mars metropolis (a mix-and-match recreation of Justified Season 1 DVD Box Set, Tokyo, and Paris alive with ethnic boroughs) on Halloween Eve. It makes for a strange chemistry: part high tech thriller, part high energy action spectacle, with a dark undercurrent and solemn gravity constantly goosed by goony comic relief.

If you can’t make the leap into the stylized world of anime, then this will all feel splashy, silly, and surreal, an inconsistent oddity set to an eclectic score. But if you can take the conventions on their own terms, “Cowboy Bebop: The Movie” is, for all its gangly shifts in tone and comic book dialogue (which clomps along in the English dub soundtrack), surprisingly entertaining, animated with a sensitivity to light, shadow, and color and filled with unexpected moments of delicacy (don’t miss the lovely closing The Legend of Seeker Seasons 1 2 DVD Box Set) amidst the epic scenes of urban combat and explosive sci-fi action. Features the original Japanese and English dub soundtracks in uncompressed PCM Stereo but no supplements.