released 28 sep 01 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* Anime has, for a certain amount of good reason, a reputation for violence and bloodshed, but YOU'RE UNDER ARREST does its best to deflate that stereotype.
This DVD consist of four half-hour adventures of a group of traffic cops at a Tokyo precinct station. Typically this might lead you to expect lots of action and gunplay, but in reality these stories are very tame, with most of the excitement derived from high-speed chases. Those who are action junkies will probably find YOU'RE UNDER ARREST intolerably slow, and even I found that the episodes seemed longer than a half hour simply because they were so easy-going. They focus on two femme cops, disciplined Miyuki and outrageous Natsumi, plus their colleagues at the station, and involve high-speed chases through city streets.
If you don't mind the tame story lines, you can certainly enjoy the very good production qualities, and if these stories tend to lack excitement, that's possibly the price to be paid for just being so gosh-awful nice.
This is about what you would expect from Koosuke Fujishima, whose better known OH MY GODDESS series is almost a tribute to sweetness and light. Not to mention automotive technologies ... of course, any work by "GearHead" Fujishima has to be litter with car technology and car talk, featuring such items as nitro-fueled Austin Minis and the like.
Oh, and one other thing: this video is a love tribute to Tokyo. Never has a big metropolis looked so clean and pretty -- sunlit in the day, sparkling like a fairy-tale kingdom at night, jetliners swooping overhead into the cloud-spotted skies.