Sometimes, there's something that gets made and you're like "Why such a project?". This is exactly one of those times as I was watching Bean Bandit.

To talk about Bean Bandit, I'd say rewinding the clock is necessary. Saddle up, this is going to be a long read. If you are not interested in the history of the works, just skip until the paragraph that starts with a big, bold "until".

Bean is an old character from the 80s created by Kenichi Sonoda in his craze for guns and cars and bombs and old American police flicks like Starsky and Hutch, the Cop of Beverly Hills and more. The concept is simple: Bean is a courier à la The Transporter, aka. the best in his domain. He takes on high-risk missions abroad his monstruously customed car and always accomplishes his mission... at a hefty cost. During his work, he's accompanied by his trustworthy manager Rally Vincent, expert in all kinds of firearms, from Magnum .357, Beretta 9mm, shotguns, and many more. It's a simple premise that promised us a lot of simple fun and action and delivered those in the '89 OVA Riding Bean by AIC and Artmic. The first episode was of very good facture with pure 80s aesthetics, a rocky soundtrack, some balls-to-the-wall action, and is still a must-watch for fans of early Japanese OVAs. It certainly marked a promising beginning for a fun series.

And then... nothing.
The project came to screeching halt and was cancelled. According to rumors, there was a fallout between Kenichi Sonoda and Toshiba EMI at the time, which led to the cancellation of the project, and the manga that was ultimately cancelled as well.

But master Sonoda certainly hadn't said his last word and decided to use his ideas and drive to make the very next year the manga Gunsmith Cats, starring Rally Vincent as the protagonist, now retconned as an American woman of Indian descent (who never was Bean's manager), accompanied by May Hopkins, a former child prostitute expert in explosives, as well as Bean as a supporting character. Together, the female pair work at the shop Gunsmith Cats. This work is also very entertaining and quite gripping and ultimately gave birth to the homonymous '95 action OVA which is a bop of fun, albeit definitely not as dark and osé as the manga it took some of its characters from.

Afterwards, Gunsmith Cats made a timid comeback in 2004 with Gunsmith Cats BURST, a sequel to the original manga but definitely lacking in spirit, ambition and inspiration. Not knowing what to do outside of showcasing Sonoda's love for firearms, using May merely as an erotic fan service device, using one of the characters as a trigger to end it all in a fairly bitter way, etc. Ultimately, this "burst" faded out a bit like a fart in the wind and that was supposed to be the end of it.

UNTIL Sonoda, never giving up, decided to use a controversial method to get something done: he called onto Kickstarter back in 2018 to finance his project called Bean Bandit, which would be a revival of the original concept, and considering what I read from the Kickstarter page, it looks like the disaster didn't stop at the OVA itself.

Because yeah, I'm not going to sugarcoat it: this is NOT good. The OVA was even financed with a higher budget than your average anime episode (23 343 872 ¥ compared the average of 13 million yen for a standard 23 min episode) and definitely didn't suffer from the same crushing deadlines so I don't know what excuses could be made here. This is NOT a standard episode. This is a total of 7 minutes of "animation". That's it. And I'm putting the word animation between quotation marks because this is just. So. Stiff.
Between stills with voiceover made to buy time at little cost and the absolute minimal animation, alongside the disgusting modern, soulless artstyle with some heavy CGI used for the cars (I'm also split because on the one hand, this doesn't have the artstyle featured on the advertising header of the Kickstarter page, which was criminal, but also this feels like yet another lie by the creators), this is just not acceptable in animation except at a very amateur level, and even then, you can find students in animation making much better craft on YouTube for their graduation work.

The content is also absolutely nothing interesting. It's just a bunch of short excerpts featuring the main characters of the original stories in a few situations, with some gratuitous fan service (nothing that the Gunsmith Cats manga and OVA didn't get us used to though), some stiff action, with no link between the scenes. The directing is also miserable and there are no interesting shots, which makes it all even duller.
It feels more like a "demo tape" for an upcoming OVA that would be the main dish, and I had to check several times to see that, no, this actually IS the content of the Blu-ray Disc that was shipped to the backers earlier this year. I really can't imagine their disappointment. Heck, I didn't even pay for this and I am still very disappointed.

Even the voice actors can't save this work from being just uninteresting: if they are not miscast (like Perry's VA), they deliver their lines with moderate enthusiasm and for those who actually try, the clash between the poor animation and the attempt at giving some LIFE to this wreck makes all the flaws even more apparent. At least, May and Rally's casting fits good, I guess. But even then, they removed the Gunsmith Cats retcon of Rally I talked about earlier and showcased her working alongside Bean again, removing her Indian heritage, while also showing characters that are part of Gunsmith Cats. This doesn't make sense and is so stupid.

Really, there's nothing that can save this. So the question is: what happened? Mismanagement is the best explanation I can find, especially if this was made with very few people. Seems like the project's had a bumpy road and I'm guessing everything related to it suffered as a result. Honestly, this is so shameful that the entire project is being put to question in my head. "Why Bean?" "Why now?". Riding Bean (and Gunsmith Cats by association) is a product of its time that thrives on its 80s vintage, and Gunsmith Cats carried the torch successfully until the BURST incident that proved that Sonoda just didn't have it anymore. He should have gotten the memo and understood that, well, his time was up and maybe he should focus on something else instead.

Here instead, we just get the death throes of a sterile mind still lost in the glory of the 70s/80s and it's sad. And boring. At least, it doesn't impact the former works and even makes them shine even more through comparison. And that's the only quality I can find in Bean Bandit.