There is plenty of crazy humor, from surrealistic to gross-out, laid over a plot frame that is melancholy and somber. Naota Nandaba, a shy 12-year-old sixth grader, has to put up with Mamimi Samejima, a 17-year-old who was his older brother's girlfriend before he left Japan. Mamimi is clearly retarded. She has dropped out of high school because of being bullied for her backwardness, and hangs around Naota because she got used to him as a "little brother." She feels comfortable with him because of his physical age. At the same time she is emotionally confused by her adolescence, trying to act grown-up by smoking and beginning to grope Naota because it feels good. Naota is highly embarrassed but feels a responsibility to his brother to try to keep Mamimi out of trouble. Into their life rides Haruko, a manic girl on a Vespa scooter who immediately clobbers Naota with an electric guitar. She claims to be a Galaxy Patrol officer space alien, and enough weird things begin happening to make her claim plausible. Naota starts to grow horns, and a giant robot with a TV-monitor head pops out of his own head. It is hard for the "what does it mean?" analysts to avoid interpreting this as a metaphor for the onset of Naoto's adolescence; a time when a person's body begins to change in grotesque and embarrassing ways. And this is just part of the first episode.

The two half-hour episodes are repeated on the DVD with a complete director's cut version. Tsurumaki explains the anime and manga ingroup references in the series, and such tricks as how he assigned scenes to different key animators so that their individual styles would make the animation subtly different without changing the art design. This is besides plenty of scenes with deliberate art design changes. At one point the animation stops and the scene is related by flash-forward focusing upon a series of cartoon-art panels; this scene is also published as a 12-page mini-comic book within a 24-page booklet that comes with the DVD. FLCL means highly imaginative weirdness that is meant to be confusing in a cool way.

© 2002 Image Entertainment.

Hyper Police. V.1 - V. 6.
TV series (25 episodes), 1997. General Director: Takahiro Omori. V.1-V.5, 4 episodes/100 minutes; V.6, 5 episodes/125 minutes. Price & format: VHS English $14.98/DVD bilingual $19.99. Distributor: Image Entertainment.

Hyper Police was little noticed when it first appeared on Japanese TV (April 3 -- September 25, 1997) because of its 1:15 a.m. time-slot, but it has since won a following on video due to its high quality. It is a bizarre but appealing combination of exotic fantasy and a buddy-cop TV series. While this mixture as one-shot parody can be traced back to Stan Freberg's 1953 "St. George and the Dragonet" spoof of Dragnet, an ongoing series built around supernatural cops (werewolves make good police because, unless they're shot with silver bullets, they heal almost instantly) is very rare.

Few of the plots are procedural mysteries. Instead the series is a soap opera about the fortunes of a private police company in a semi-destroyed futuristic Tokyo inhabited by a mixture of humans, demons, funny animals, monsters, gods, and you name it. The background is never fully explained, partly because the TV series is an adaptation of a manga serial by MEE (Minoru Tachikawa) that started in 1993 and is still going, but apparently there was some cataclysm 22 years earlier that reestablished magic on Earth. Cryptic one-liners like, "Ever since the Earth's axis shifted, there's no difference between summer and winter anymore," are dropped into the dialogue every so often. There is obvious racial (species?) prejudice between the pure humans and the others, and a lot of crossbreeding. ("Cat monster" teen protagonist Natsuki Sasahara's father was human; her mother was 2/3rds cat.) Crime has become so severe that the law now permits private police companies to supplement the government police. These operate on a pay-as-you-go system; the one that Natsuki works for specializes in capturing criminals for government rewards, which makes it a cross between a police force and a bounty-hunter corporation. It is a very marginal business; at one point it goes bankrupt and the staff have to get separate jobs until it can refinance and open up again. (There is a hilarious sequence of Natsuki as a waitress at a pastiche of a well-known American fast-food restaurant chain.) The mixture of magic and routine police procedure is generally clever (what are the legal aspects of using enchanted silver dum-dum bullets?). Many of the supernatural references are based on Oriental mythology (Sakura, Natsuki's partner, is a nine-tailed fox with only eight tails, trying to earn her ninth). The post-midnight time-slot permitted some risqué humor (another main character, the werewolf Batanen, usually has a porno magazine in his desk), although nothing stronger than in American TV animation like Beavis and Butt-head.