Seatbelts with Mai Yamane - Blue

JAM

Shinichiro Watanabe and Yoko Kanno back together at last! The Cowboy Bebop duo are reteaming to adapt Yuki Kodama's award-winning manga Sakamichi no Apollon, a sixties set school drama about alienated teens and the power of jazz. I've watched this thirty-second tease about a billion times now - that short clip of the twiggy drumsticks going to work is the most exciting piece of animation I've seen in a good while. Watanabe's patented mix of agitated hyperkinetics and despondent navel-gazing look set to kill this.

Yoko Kanno and The Seatbelts - Memory and Tank!

When I first saw Cowboy Bebop on lent Chinese bootleg DVDs, this is how every single episode started: a mournful musicbox montage of Spike destroying his old life before segueing wildly into the impossibly funky opening theme. When I tracked down my own Region 1 copies a few years later I was disappointed to discover this attention grabbing contrast only played at the head of a few eps. Shame. It was an ideal summation of the series: rainy lone-man functioning spliced with a hyperactive stray cat clash.