Like the Ah! Megami-sami universe, the You’re Under Arrest franchise is the product of Kosuke Fujishima’s imagination. Miyuki and Natsumi are traffic cops in Tokyo. Miyuki is very organized, a gearhead who’s also handy with a soldering iron, a virtuosic driver, sweet and motherly and very nice. Natsumi is impulsive, skillful with two-wheeled vehicles, sweet and very nice. Then there’s motorcycle cop Ken, who’s also very nice, and Yoriko, who’s a gossipy nuisance but still very nice.
It must be wonderful to be Kosuke Fujishima; I know of few creators whose works are so relentlessly nice. (Or perhaps his life is miserable and he compensates by constructing pleasant daydreams.) The Ah! My Goddess movie works because underneath the sweetness is a story with some philosophical depth. In what I’ve seen of You’re Under Arrest, however, the struggles are trivial: catch a reckless driver, or get a pregnant cat to the vet despite nasty weather. The episodes are pleasant and amusing and forgettable. While there is nothing objectionable in the OVA, there’s no reason to recommend it.
The four OVA episodes serve as the beginning of the television series, which ran for two years. The fifth YUA episode is distinctly lower-quality in every respect than the OVA. It introduces a new character, Aoi, a male cop who’s played female decoys so long that he no longer remembers how to behave like a man. Yeah, right. This was the first episode in which I saw a nosebleed, and it was the last I watched. There’s a lot more You’re Under Arrest material, but I doubt I’ll investigate it further.
(2005)
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