Riding Bean

Rating:
Summary: Some good driving action in lightweight anime crime thriller
Review: RIDING BEAN (1989) is a 45-minute Japanese animated crime thriller--with some humorous elements--set in Chicago and featuring an all-American cast. Bean Bandit is a high-paid getaway driver whose last job, for a pair of ruthless killers/armed robbers who are not quite what they seem, leads to reluctant involvement in a kidnapping case involving the 11-year-old daughter of a Chicago-area tycoon. Bean and his female sidekick, Rally Vincent, are soon saddled with the kidnap victim and have great difficulty returning her without invoking the wrath of the police and the tycoon's vengeful private army. When they catch up to the real kidnappers, the chase is on.

The tone of the piece is light-hearted and fast-paced, with as much emphasis on Bean's driving skills and the remarkable features of his custom-made car, which get him out of more than one tough scrape, as on the story. It's nothing like the more serious (and more violent) Crying Freeman and Golgo 13 anime series. While there's much more bloodshed and brutality in those series, their idealized hitman heroes are actually much nobler characters than Bean and Rally, never harming innocent people and killing only those who deserve it. Bean and Rally, in contrast, are complicit in cold-blooded murder of innocents (committed during the robbery that opens the story) and endangering the public safety (causing numerous accidents in the car chase scenes) and, on a moral scale, only a notch above the killers/kidnappers who employ them.

All that said, there's a lot of good action here, including a spectacular car chase through the streets of Chicago that draws on well-known car chases from more famous live-action movies. Although the DVD offers both English and Japanese-language tracks, I tend to prefer the English track for a story set in America with an all-American cast of characters.