Anime Meta-Review
You're under Arrest! Movie
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Title Info
- type: movie
- grade: watchable
- people: Fujishima
- made: unknown
- Review created: Recently, but I didn't record the date.
- mod: none
I'm a great fan of almost everything Fujishima (manga author of this and Oh My Goddess!) does, and thus it may well seem suprising to find this anime here. The reason is simple, I don't detect his familiar touch in this movie at all, which leads to it being a bit of a frankenstein. The story centers around Bokuto precinct police center, where many interesting characters work including our heroines the tech-capable Miyuki and the physically capable Natsumi. What is supposed to be their return to normality quickly becomes anything but as a conspiracy from the past threatens to unleash violence and danger in their own backyard. Time for some hard core police action.
And in a nutshell that's the whole problem. The YUA (you're under arrest) i'm familiar with, from the manga and OAV's, is the typical Fujishima character piece with low key action. After all, the focus in the originals was on traffic enforcement, which is why none of them are armed and why they drive small efficient cars. Admittedly this seems to draw from source material I haven't seen (either later manga or YUA TV series) but getting this crew of loved characters into a full on cop-action movie just doesn't make sense. And this problem is obvious in the anime. Watching them take on sub-machine gun armed criminals with paint-guns defies belief and there are multiple unbelievable events to keep them in the thick of the action. Of course if the sort of events shown here actually happened then I doubt Japan would rely on two traffic officers as their almost sole response. As a result some of the very realistic police action becomes irritating, because one moment it is all deadly and serious and the next there is a flash of character humor or characters surviving simply because the author cannot afford realism. If they wanted to do a realistic epic-action cop drama why didn't they do so, without dragging the YUA characters into it?i
The irritation mounts with the fact that the production is really good. The characters all look lovely (there are a lot of female police officers in YUA, another reason why you won't see any fatalities) and are nicely animated. The techology is accurately represented, the environment rich and realistic and the general animation quality excellent. The action is believable and detailed, with clear evidence of thought in the tactical scenes (barring their total unbelievability in parts). The dialogue is good but limited, and the story is tense, albeit open to question as to whether it makes perfect sense. The mood, ambience and representation of policing all add to the realism of the anime. The voices, sounds and music are also good. The only problem I have is the use of some, albeit detailed, stills at critical points which simply don't do anything for me, serving only to remind me I am watching an anime. And there you have it, a wonderful production of a police action movie, in which the YUA crew are like hostages.
None of the sites I source from has a review (yet) for this anime.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:27 WST 2009