Joseph Luster
January 16, 2009 
Coyote Ragtime Show goes out of its way to make a bizarre first impression on the viewer. Aside from purposely obscuring who the real protagonist of the show is in episode one, it really pulls out all the stops that should send off warning flares heralding a series that’s trying too hard to be “cool.” The name alone sounds like something that was cobbled together via random word association tables, and just like the title, there’s a lot of style over substance in the opening act. Don’t let this come off as indicative of the show’s overall quality, though. While it’s certainly over the top, this introduction successfully corrals the entire cast of the series into one location, showing almost every major player at once and establishing the three-pronged style of storytelling that gives Coyote Ragtime Show a somewhat unique edge.
The three prongs in question are The Criminal Guild, The Milkyway Federation, and the crew lead by a tough old man named Mister and the young girl he’s taken under his wing, Franca. Madame Marciano of the Criminal Guild murdered Franca’s father, Pirate King Bruce, but not before he could leave a treasure for his daughter: a crap-ton of money buried deep in a high-tech vault under the surface of the planet Graceland. The catch here is that, thanks to an ongoing war, a Photonic bomb is set to blow Graceland to smithereens in a matter of days, so the clock is ticking and they need to get to the payload before the very ground it’s buried in is nothing but space dust.
With the rat race in full gear-P.I. Angelica Burns of Milkyway is determined to capture Mister, Madame Marciano wants the treasure for herself, and so on-Coyote Ragtime Show spends the majority of its total running time hatching a heist and building up to a final showdown between each group. By the time we reach that point, the aforementioned absurdity is kind of charming, from Marciano’s 12 Sisters (each named after a calendar month) to the bank vault that rotates its connected bits like a grayscale Rubik’s Cube. All of these components fit together fairly well, and in the end it’s apparent that the show isn’t nearly as haphazardly whipped together as its name would imply.
While Mister starts off the series as a pretty two-dimensional character, it doesn’t take long to see that there’s more to him than what’s on the surface. He’s an old bruiser on the outside, but he remains selfless in the face of what are essentially impossible odds. On the other hand, Madame Marciano couldn’t be a flatter villain, and she’s the least interesting thing about the entire series. Her 12 Sisters-all of whom would be equally forgettable if not for the violence they dish out infrequently-are the only things she seems to have a connection to, and the facts behind that relationship are vague at best.
Despite the fact that Coyote Ragtime Show is only a 12-episode series, the animation takes the kind of early dip that’s typically associated with a longer series that has to spread its budget more thinly. The first couple of episodes lead you to believe that the whole run will match the blazingly fluid action, but it hits its peak during a bar fight in, if I remember correctly, episode two. The spinning backhands and twirling bodies come off like something Madhouse would whip up, but it’s more or less downhill from there. Not that the animation is awful after that point, it’s just relatively unremarkable. 
After all is said and done, it’s apparent the folks at ufotable were just aiming to make a stylish, fast-paced action show without a lot of unnecessary threads to unravel, and they succeeded in that for the most part. There actually isn’t a ton of action throughout, but the way the series is directed manages to mask that somehow and make it seem a bit more exciting than it really is. Being gloriously succinct might be the show’s strongest suit, as disparaging as that sounds, but it’s fun, and the length makes it an investment that doesn’t demand more than a few hours of the viewer’s time.
Oh, and for those that haven’t seen any of it, it’s worth mentioning that Coyote Ragtime Show has a stop-motion animated credits sequence. If that doesn’t get you to at least try out the first couple of episodes, nothing will.
Studio/Company: FUNimation
Available: Now
Rating: TVMA
