Two rookie Tokyo policewomen must fight terrorists in You’re Under Arrest!

You’re Under Arrest!: The Motion Picture.
TV special feature, 1999. Director: Junji Nishimura. 90 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: A.D.V. Films.

You’re Under Arrest! (Taiho Shichauzo) began as the second most popular manga creation of Kosuke Fujishima (Oh! My Goddess). Brash Natsumi Tsujimoto and demure Miyuki Kobayakawa are two rookie policewomen assigned as an Odd-Couple team at the Traffic Control Department of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police’s Bokuto Station. The series gained popularity as a charismatic soap opera about the adventures and romances among the detectives and staff of the Bokuto station, with Natsumi and Miyuki originally to be little more than meter maids in their “pet” Honda Today police car (a “micromini” model not imported into the U.S. because it is so tiny) but somehow always ending up in the midst of the action.

YUA was first animated as a four-episode OAV series in 1994, then as a 47-episode TV series in 1996, and most recently as an April 1999 Tuesday-Friday daily TV 20-episode mini-series (six minutes each) plus this 90-minute TV special Taiho Shichauzo: The Movie, broadcast on April 24, 1999, animated by Studio Deen.

Miyuki and Natsumi return to Bokuto Station after a year’s training among other Tokyo police divisions to broaden their capabilities, just in time for an apparent terrorist assault on the metropolis. Mysterious tips lead the police to hidden caches of automatic weapons; computer hackers sabotage Tokyo’s automated traffic lights and telephone system, paralyzing the city; bridges are blown up. Bokuto Station is totally mobilized along with all others, but it quickly becomes an unnatural center of the action — so much so that Police HQ suspects a tie-in between the terrorists and a Bokuto detective who disappeared two years earlier.

Bokuto’s popular chief is relieved of his command and the staff falls under suspicion. Miyuki as a computer expert, Natsumi as an anti-terrorist expert and the rest of the cast well-known to YUA fans — grumpy but good-hearted Superintendent Arizuka, gruffly fatherly Inspector Tokuno, workaholic Ass’t Inspector Kinoshita, ditzy female staff supervisor Nikaido and several others — must surreptitiously fight their own HQ superiors to clear themselves and find the secret behind the real terrorists.

The mystery is suspensefully and believably developed. An exciting finale was wanted, and while the action is plausibly motivated and well choreographed, it goes over the top into an Assault on Precinct 13-type attack on Bokuto Station followed by a Speed-type pursuit of the escaping villains. “You will believe that a mini-police car can operate on land — at sea — and in the air!”

Some fans grumbled about the suddenly extremely noticeable limited animation during this action climax, although professional animators may be more forgiving for what the Studio Deen staff accomplished with a TV animation production budget. YUA fans were not disappointed, and the movie is self-contained enough to be enjoyable to fans of police action TV series not familiar with the previous YUA stories.

Fred Patten has written on anime for fan and professional magazines since the late 1970s. He wrote the liner notes for Rhino Entertainment’s The Best of Anime music CD (1998), and was a contributor to The World Encyclopedia of Cartoons, 2nd Edition, ed. by Maurice Horn (1999) and Animation in Asia and the Pacific, ed. by John A. Lent (2001).