#463
Post
by feihong » Wed Jan 19, 2022 1:12 am
Over the last 2 weeks I undertook the Herculean challenge of watching all––absolutely ALL––of the animated content for the You're Under Arrest! series. It boils down to a 4-episode initial OAV series, a 47–episode TV series, a special beach episode (You're Under Arrest: Diverting Traffic at the Beach), a series of 20 mini–episodes, a 2nd TV series, You're Under Arrest: Fast and Furious, of 26 episodes, a single-episode OAV called You're Under Arrest: No Mercy!, a feature film, and a 3rd TV series, You're Under Arrest: Full Throttle, running 24 episodes. Fast and Furious and Full Throttle turned out to be rare enough I had to take advantage of the 14-day free trial of HiDive in order to see them. I ordered what part of the Manga had been translated back in the day, but I haven't received those books yet to compare. I'm told the anime materials depart almost entirely from the manga.
What a roller-coaster of emotions it has been. So, so much was frustrating about viewing these. To say they have dated badly would be an understatement. The copaganda alone is objectionable, but the blistering chauvinism and the various shows' bizarrely vacillating attitudes towards its trans character are absolutely stomach-churning. I found it necessary to recall that this was a series of shows made predominantly in the 90s, reflecting very strongly the prevailing attitudes of the times, but also adapted from a manga made in the 80s. So the attitudes it presents are inherited from an even more presumably retrograde source. I know from reading his later manga that manga author Kosuke Fujishima is fond of queer-baiting in his manga, but pretty much entirely opposed to making his subtext into text. He prefers the kind of neoliberal chauvinism that believes people's feelings are "just a phase;" one they'll eventually grow out of, melding properly into an existing conservative social structure as they "grow up." Incredibly, these retrograde views apply to almost all the cops featured in these shows, from the queerbaiting of main characters Natsumi and Miyuki to motorbike cop Kenny's pathological shyness about romance, to trans character Aoi's decision to live as a woman. The shows as a whole demonstrate remarkable consistency in their inconsistency––narrative is only quasi-progressive, with copious resets of the timeline, alternate narrative episodes (including two ancient Edo murder mysteries with the cast and an OAV that posits them all as American, trigger-happy counterparts), and episodes right next to one another which just directly contradict what has gone immediately before. It seems like the result of several different writers, with subtly different takes on the material, writing the episodes in tandem––but with no idea what one another is working on. It is a dizzying mess of often objectionable material. In addition, the art and animation vary quite extremely between the seasons, with most characters getting upwards of 3 visual redesigns through the various series. The 3 TV series are marketed as "seasons," but each season looks and feels remarkably different, as if different studios completed each one––and yet, literally all of this material, made over a more than 10-year period, was created by the same animation company, Studio Deen. Quality-wise, the show fluctuates between bad and worse––besides the extremely frustrating writing, the animation is frequently minimal. Studio Deen does come out swinging with the first OAV series––that and the movie are the only well-animated parts of this endeavor. The TV seasons are all low-quality in terms of animation, and in You're Under Arrest: Fast and Furious (season 2), not only is the animation almost the worst of any of these, but even the drawn layouts are miserable. The OAV episode following Fast and Furious, You're Under Arrest: No Mercy! has decent layouts and drawing, but has the absolute lowest-level animation of the entire You're Under Arrest cinematic universe.The layout and some of the animation quality picks up again in You're Under Arrest: Full Throttle (season 3), but it never gets good again, like in the original 4-episode OAV and in the film. But it's hard not to see Studio Deen struggling to keep up with the demands of this show. Their fame, I think, mostly rests on the 80s and early-90s Rumiko Takahashi TV adaptations of Ursei Yatsura and Ranma 1/2. This is not a studio with a great record of quality. Probably the most dizzying single aspect of watching all the different products in a row is the character redesigns. The two leads, Natsumi and Miyuki, are always recognizable, as is their gossipy pal Yoriko and the traffic division section chief. But other characters are constantly changing in all forms of appearance, including shape and stature, but also hair color and styling, head shape, I mean, just everything. Aoi Futaba gets the worst of it, with a complete visual redesign in every different iteration of the property. Her Season 2 redesign is the absolute nadir of the show––she goes from wide-eyed, bouncy, and Ranma 1/2-styled all the way to Ninja Scroll––severe and inanimate. Her redesign for the No Mercy OAV and then her subsequent redesign for Season 3 redeem the mistake of Season 2's excrutiating 26-episode run. But everything about Aoi is handled in this kind of start-stop, forwards-now-backwards kind of attitude.
Why did I put myself through all this? For Aoi. For Aoi Futaba. In spite of everything, she is the reason to watch the show. The show proper follows Natsumi Tsujimoto and Miyuki Kobayakawa, two Tokyo Metropolitan Police traffic cops whose diverse skills and charged partnership lead them to make big arrests far outside the scope of their division. Their two constant foils are their close friends, a second traffic police partnership, Yoriko Nikaidou and Aoi Futaba. Aoi is very different than what one expects. Born male, Aoi worked previously on the vice squad. Working as bait for vice stings, Aoi dressed as a woman, and subsequently just never stopped dressing and living as a woman. She is the first trans character as such I have seen in a series like this, whose trans identity is frequently treated simply as background material, and not as a sort of pyrotechnic narrative special effect for the show. That said, there are many unfortunate episodes which double-back on the progressive concept of this stance, and exploit Aoi's "otherness," usually for cheap gags––leading back to my "multiple-authors-working-at-cross-purposes" theory of how this was all put together. It's very clear from her first appearance (the first episode of the first TV series) that the writers do not understand much about what it would be like to transition from male to female. A repeated gag involves lecherous peepers (every version of the property is absolutely stacked with peepers and other slathering perverts as mostly antagonists––and then, in a hot springs vacation episode, as antagonists who end up joining up with our heroes to stop someone stealing a snowmobile) sneaking into the locker room to watch gorgeous babe Aoi changing, only to literally start throwing up when they discover she's wearing...boxer shorts?!?!?! You would think the joke would wear itself out quickly; instead, the writers repeat and repeat it in season after season. What's more, however, it isn't a very honest joke. Aoi wears the narrow policewoman's pencil skirt for most of the show, and she sometimes goes under cover wearing evening dresses; she wouldn't be wearing boxer shorts in either ensemble (and the show is more than happy to show cisgendered women in women's underwear all the time). The first episode is, embarrassingly all about which changing room Aoi should use. The women don't want a m-m-m-man in there with them! And the men don't want a b-b-b-b-beautiful lady in their changing room! They compromise in the stupidest way: Aoi will change in the women's changing room, only at times the cisgendered women aren't present. Prevalent early on, and sometimes brought up again later in the series, is the cisgendered policewomen's fervent belief that Aoi just has some switch flipped in her brain, and that if they find the right psychological trigger, he'll go back to being a man again. Eventually, things settle down, and Aoi simply becomes a valuable contributing member of the unit. Over a long swath of time in the series, we come to understand some character details about her. She studies flower arranging and understands the language of flowers. She still apparently has all of her toy robots from when she was a kid on display in her apartment. She's a judo expert. She wants to find a man who will lover her. This last point is an incredible sticking point for the writers again and again, because they frequently set Aoi up on dates, only to defuse these dates with the grossly offensive suggestion––usually brought up by Aoi herself––that she can't actually date a man. The most palatable expression of this is in the episode "A White Rose for Aoi," in which a popular actor gets to be the chief of the traffic division for a day as part of a promotional tour for a movie. Aoi is his bodyguard, at his request, because she served that role for him in the past. Aoi is surprised to discover the actor has feelings for her. He confesses to her and proposes marriage on the spot. Aoi wrestles with this, presumably because the writers themselves can't accept it, and eventually she tells the man she was assigned male at birth. He is VERY surprised, and as viewers we can understand that, as an actor that is the heartthrob, the romantic fantasy of a bazillion teenaged girls, he maybe, possibly couldn't marry a policewoman who is biologically a man. But at the end of the episode Aoi sees him interviewed on TV, wearing a white rose, which he tells the press is a symbol of his unending respect for a very special person he met at the Bokuto police department.
Other episodes handle this iniquity of the times in quite another way, presenting Aoi as flippantly dating multiple men online (this episode resolves into the main quartet of women driving almost cross-country so Aoi can confess to her online crush, who is being whisked away on a speeding bus). Most commonly, Aoi joins in the women's talk of men around the station, expressing her desire to marry or maybe even just date a nice man––only to be cut off by her partner Yoriko, who has to remind her she's a maaaaaaan! The tone of these episodes is all over the place, though very in-keeping with the general inconsistency of the writing. Initially Aoi is presented as an agile former high-school basketball star. In episodes where the police use her as a sort of honey-trap for abductors and clothes slashers, Aoi ends up arresting scores of perverts lusting after her. We're told she requested posting to the traffic division after a decorated stint in vice. In other episodes she's presented as physically inept and incompetent as a police officer. Sometimes she provides the key observation which cracks a case. Other times she screws it all up by being a flighty, hysterical woman (that's the writers' take on her, not mine). Bizarrely, in the "A White Rose for Aoi" episode, even though she is appointed bodyguard to the actor, he ends up having to save her from one of his jealous fans, who attacks her with a bicycle chain. Sometimes Aoi is presented quaking in fear at the threat of violence. Other times, she demonstrates her expertise in judo and immediately locks down the perp. In the last episode of the first season, she looks into a car on the road shoulder to see if the driver's all right, and gets shot in the face––yet by the end of the episode she seems to have just shrugged it off somehow (in the final scene it's revealed she is actually shot in the shoulder, but the layout in the initial shooting scene makes it look like she could only have been hit in the face). Typical of the vacillating between queasily objectionable treatment and startlingly, casually progressive treatment of Aoi is the late Season 3 episode where a retired sergeant from Aoi's old vice precinct arrives and starts teaching everyone int he traffic division judo. Natsumi and the others take to the garrulous old man right away, but when they go looking for Aoi, realizing she wasn't present when the man introduced himself, they find her hiding under the table in the tea break room. Turns out this retired sergeant was Aoi's mentor in the vice division, who taught her judo and who masterminded the stings where she initially dressed as a woman. The man made it his mission to re-masculate Aoi by hook or by crook––suggesting that maybe Aoi transferred out of vice to get away from this overbearing creep. The judo sessions prove too strenuous for the other cops, and eventually just Natsumi and Aoi remain taking his lessons––Aoi out of her gentle sense of almost filial piety towards this guy, and Natsumi because she likes to fight. When the retired Sergeant takes a few days off, Aoi and Natsumi go to his house to make sure he's okay. He's thrown his back out. Later, the man tries to stop a convenience-store robbery, but his back injury stops him from judo-throwing the robber, and we discover Aoi has backtracked and jumps in with just the right judo throw to make everything okay. On the walk back to his home, the sergeant finally admits that maybe it's okay for Aoi to live her life as a woman. He indicates that he's proud of her, and impressed with her judo throw. Aoi's long suffering over the course of the episode––wanting to hide from this guy who is trying to dominate and dictate her sexuality, but unable not to show him kindness and consideration––gets paid off with this guy's acceptance. The audience just has to go through so many queasy minutes of anti-trans slurs and backwards attitudes before it happens. That's kind of the push and the pull with Aoi's character, and it is hard to take. In the end, of course, there's no tremendous payoff for any of Aoi's stories. She isn't one of the chief protagonists of the show, she's one of the lead supporting characters. Nobody has any character arc you can follow in this story, but of the 4 main roles, Aoi always seems to get the worst of it, because of the inconsistency with which her character is handled. Yet she remains the most consistently delightful and fun character to watch in the show––such an interesting and unusual creative choice for the time in which she appeared.
But the show is also about cops, and that is another strange aspect of it. What copaganda is there generally seems more accidental than deliberate on the creators' part. The emphasis in the show is definitely more on a "woman in a workplace" type of drama than it is on collaring perps and dealing with superiors who don't understand what it's like on the streets. Those elements do work their way into the show, but for the whole first season the emphasis is largely on Natsumi and Miyuki working together, and then whether or not Miyuki and cycle cop Ken Nakajima will ever go on a date. The characters constantly drone in a sort of nightmare obverse of the Bechdel test about what kind of man they can find, and how quickly they can get married. The ending credits to the first season feature Miyuki kneeling in a white wedding dress on a black background, soft focused over a pop song. It's a strikingly out-of-place image, considering we actually never see Miyuki getting married in the show (she does do wedding drag at the marriage of Ken's bosozoku father to a lady roadster driver). After the first season, a beach-set special actually does a bait-and-switch and simply focuses on Natsumi and Miyuki doing their traffic cop duties next to a beach, rather than what you'd expect of one of those episodes. Occasionally, Natsumi and Miyuki's policework goes a little beyond what one would hope for with police officers; Natsumi, it turns out, is strong enough to deadlift a car, which produces some disastrous results, pretty frequently. In the second season the duo gets paintball guns, which they frequently fire at the windshields of getaway cars and out-of-control trucks. One such truck actually careens straight off a bridge after they do this. And eventually, there comes an episode where the more mild-mannered of the main duo, Miyuki, decides to die alongside a perp she's trying to collar, deliberately ramming his car and her own over a cliff for the honor of the Bokuto Traffic Division. This sort of "collar by kamikaze" lands very, very strangely late in the third season, as the show is nearly over. But even though there are many characters who protest the actions of the police throughout the stories, it is the clear point of view of the writers that they shan't be interjecting any analysis into the effects of policing. In fact, Natsumi and Miyuki frequently go past the boundaries of the law in pursuit of collars, get lectured for it, but then all is forgiven when they make their ultimate bust. There is in one isolated instance a 2-part storyline dealing with a "Magnum Force"–like collection of rogue cops––including a leader who actually is prepared to die in a blaze of glory simply because the police didn't agree to fund his extrajudicial task force request. This is one of the best stories of actual policework in the series, as nearly every member of the main cast has to pull together to capture the leader of these rogue vigilantes alive. It includes some very exciting scenes after Ken has had his leg broken and Natsumi has her arm broken, and they resolve to drive and steer Ken's bike together, a la Only Angels Have Wings, in order to help catch the rogue cops.
Finally, I think I'll just summarize each section of the property briefly, to give you an idea of how schizoid the show is.
1. 1st OAV – You're Under Arrest!: This series is 4 episodes long, and features the best animation in the whole run. The car action in particular is beautifully drawn in this first series, which focuses on the growing respect and friendship between new partners Natsumi Tsujimoto and Miyuki Kobayakawa. Natsumi is a somewhat butch, wild biker, and Miyuki is a kind, self-effacing yet obsessive mechanic. There are strong yuri vibes coming off these first 4 episodes; Natsumi is just joining the traffic division. Miyuki has sought her out, headhunted her to be her partner. And, look at that; Natsumi needs a place to live, and it just so happens Miyuki needs a roommate (we don't see her kicking out her previous roommate when she knows Natsumi is coming, but in my headcanon that's what happened). Natsumi doesn't want a partner, and she constantly rebuffs Miyuki's gentle, tolerant entreaties of affection with increasing brusqueness. When it turns out they're able to work together as a sort flawless team, Natsuki begins to respect Miyuki, and she starts to rely upon her. The frothy lightness of this initial series––coupled with higher quality animation than we'll ever see again in the You're Under Arrest universe––seems very redolent of manga artist Kosuke Nijishima's other work. From here on out it's mostly downhill in terms of overall quality, but I can't say there was too much reason to continue with the series of series, once this initial OAV ended. Only the introduction of Aoi makes what happens next any less than tedious.
2. 1st TV series/season – You're Under Arrest!: This is the longest single chunk of the series,and I was tearing my hair out in frustration before its' almost 50 episodes were up. So little of this first season involves any actual policework. Most of the drama is in the squad room, and yet, it isn't a lot of the central drama offered by the OAV. First we get the introduction of Aoi, then we get the will-they-won't-they romance of Ken Nakajima and Miyuki, then we get a long stretch of Ken's father, Daimaru, and his new fiancee, Sena, who turns out to be Ken's age. This takes up a huge cohort of episodes––far, far more than is needed––and the Daimaru/Sena storylines continue in later seasons as well. I hated this part of the show. Also there are repeated episodes focusing on Yoriko, whose high marks on the police exam and in target shooting are the result of blind luck. Yoriko is a hard character to listen to in the English dub, but is a very funny character in the Japanese original language recording. There is a real lost-in-translation problem going on here (though in the English dub Aoi also has a light Texan lilt to her voice, which is kind of funny). Natsumi and Miyuki mostly just participate in inter-office intrigues and occasionally bust some perps. Standout episodes are the ones with the rogue police unit and an earlier 2-parter where a man is slashing women's red dresses at high-society functions. The whole traffic division goes under-cover on a cruise boat to stop this guy. These episodes are more action-packed and suspenseful, and they draw on what limited and contradictory character development the show does to make the drama feel more urgent and exciting. The episode where Natsumi finally admits her love for Lieutenant Tokairin is a good one. A White Rose for Aoi is another of the better episodes from this season, but it is marred for me when the actor's fans start intimidating Aoi, and this skilled judo expert, who has been busting vice perpetrators and demonstrating nerves of steel, suddenly starts quaking and cowering away from the women who are attacking her. Another instance where the writers don't all seem aware of what character beats they've established previously. Sometimes you wonder if some of the writers actually know Aoi is trans, or whether they think of her as another cisgendered female character.
3. You're Under Arrest Special: Diverting Traffic at the Beach: The cover art implies an episode of beachside fun, but Natsumi and Miyuki spend the whole episode working. Literally long swaths of the episode are them directing traffic to park at the beach. I was shocked to see this episode; I had started to think that they never even did their actual job, since we hardly see them doing it in the first TV season. So often they're helping homicide detectives out with investigations, or going undercover on stings, or all this other stuff. In this episode, they're literally directing traffic almost the entire time. This episode is one which throws Aoi and Yoriko under the bus, because Natsumi and Miyuki end up working longer than their shift because the other two are late to replace them. Honestly, you get the sense that the writers just sacrifice anybody at any time when they need to create these manufactured antagonisms. In other episodes Aoi and Yoriko and a highly competent team.
4. The 20 Mini-episodes, a spin–off of the television series: These went by in a blur. They are mostly more incidents of traffic cop situations, though a lot of them verge upon the surreal for the purposes of humor. Most of these are one-joke setups. They aren't bad––the show will soon get much, much worse––but they aren't really distinguished by anything. I saw these maybe 5 days ago? And I can't remember anything concrete about them.
5. You're Under Arrest: The Movie!: Somehow, at this point the series got a film adaptation, and rather than getting another studio to handle the film, Studio Deen steps up to the plate and delivers the 2nd-best animation of the You're Under Arrest multiverse. However, the film is, bizarrely, an almost beat-for-beat rip-off of Patlabor 2. This is especially weird, because the movie focuses on the Traffic Division Chief, who, we are told, is literally named "Chief Chief (is that funny? Or just a bad attempt?). This anomaly is not present in the rest of the series––there is one episode in season 1 where the chief goes to Tokyo Tower on his day off and gets trapped on the observation deck with a desperate robber and an abandoned little kid, but other than that no episodes focus on Chief Chief. He is always a background player otherwise. But the Chief plays the role Chief Goto plays in the Patlabor 2 movie, as the guy doing detective work to unravel the secrets of his own past, before a rogue group tries a sort of a coup. In this case, it's a former colleague of the chief, who is running a simulation in which Bokuto police station gets laid siege to and taken over. The traffic squad fights back. This one is high-energy, but Natsumi and Miyuki are sidelined for the first half of the picture in favor of the chief, who isn't a dynamic or interesting character, no matter how you slice it. Other characters, like Yoriko and Aoi, get even more sidelined. Because there are no character introductions, it's a movie that's impossible to get into unless you've already seen the TV series. The good animation is nice, and there are three really standout sequences: one where the police station is taken, another where Natsumi and Miyuki block off the Sumida river and engage in a boat battle with the villains, and a third sequence where they then airlift their car to a heliport so they can drive natsumi's little Motocompo scooter-bike straight into a helicopter that's taking off. The chaos in these scenes is actually quite well-rendered. But the dubious provenance of this story makes it not an entirely pleasant experience, and the downplaying of Yoriko and especially Aoi is a real shame.
6. TV Series/Season 2 – You're Under Arrest! Fast and Furious: The absolute nadir of the show, this second season boasts a huge step down in animation quality, and in art quality. There are no standout episodes I can recall. A good deal of this second season revolves around Saori Saga, a minor character player in the first season, who as a teen was inspired by Natsumi and Miyuki to try and become a cop. Now she's getting assigned to the Bokuto traffic division for her first gig in the police force, and she's going to do everything by the book, dammit. This makes for endless frustrating episodes, where Saori is scandalized by Natsumi and Miyuki suggesting some relaxed vigilance while off the job, even. Saori's rookie year is a hard one for her, but it's a hard one for the audience as well. The violence increases in this season, with one truck going of an unfinished bridge into the bay, and another perched on a rocky outcropping over a precipice in a separate episode. Natsumi and Miyuki both end up shooting paintballs at a lot of windshields, which is always a little more disturbing to see than the filmmakers seem to think it should be. Natsumi's romance with Tokairin is sort of stabilized in the backdrop, and Miyuki's romance with Nakajima remains in a painful will-they-won't-they holding pattern. This season also includes a drastic switch in the way Miyuki's love interest, motorcycle cop Nakajima is portrayed. From here on out any given character in the series has permission to neg Nakajima right to his face. They all frequently call him a loser, an idiot, a dunce, a moron, and especially a wimp. From the start of this season on, Nakajima seldom has a moment where he comes out looking good. He fumbles, drops things (he proposes to Miyuki and then immediately drops the engagement ring into a chasm), and he fails to make arrests. From here on out he frequently crashes his bike. In previous treatments, Nakajima was always seen as basically heroic and cool, and simply pathologically shy when it came to asking Miyuki out, or telling his father to cool it. The first season allows him nearly countless moments of heroism––on his bike he is supposed to be something of a prodigy, and he frequently helps out making high-profile arrests of speeders and out-of-control drivers. But after this point, he is presented solely as a goofball until the end of the whole sequence of series. The season ends with Natsumi moving on to join another section, and Miyuki having a near psychotic break when it happens. The end note of this season is actually fairly depressing––though not on purpose. The filmmakers seem to think that Miyuki should just grow up and maybe marry Nakajima, since there's a time and a season for everything, and she's not getting any younger, etc. It's a little like when the series seems to insist that Aoi just needs to put on some pants and get over herself. But what we see onscreen is very different from that. Miyuki seems to just come apart when Natsumi leaves, and a kind of dark side emerges from her, which we start to recognize more and more in the third season. Rather than turning to Nakajima, or Chief Chief, or Saori, or her friends Yoriko and Aoi, Miyuki seems to get hostile and angry, putting more violence into her work and disregarding her own safety and her new partner Saori's safety more and more. Natsumi seems cluelessly oblivious to this, which also seems out of character for her. Natsumi isn't good at figuring out other people's emotions, but we see her do it frequently for Miyuki. Not so as this dastardly season creeps across the floor to its' miserable close.
7. You're Under Arrest: No Mercy!: This is a single-episode OAV series, which had a lot of promotion behind it, but which, from what I can tell, didn't do well enough to continue. A lot of the advertising art makes it look like Miami Vice, and in fact, the episode takes place in Los Angeles. Everyone is wearing gross-looking LAPD uniforms, and everyone receives a slight redesign here. Aoi gets much more appealing than in her previous Season 2 redesign (which made her seem more serious, and which downplayed the interesting parts of her character), but this character design is short-lived, only appearing in this one episode. In this one Aoi is actually drawn with a more convincing trans male physique, for once. She has wide but faintly squared-off hips, and broader shoulders than the other women in the show. Yet she has a lot of glamour in her movements and pose (she was far more gawky and cute in season 1), and her lighter brown hair and aquiline face look strikingly feminine (a frequent complaint of the other women on the show is how Aoi always attracts the hottest guys). Interestingly, though all the major characters are here, running an LAPD station, only Natsumi and Miyuki are playing themselves. They are supposed to be on an exchange assignment to the U.S., but the other characters are all playing native Los Angelean cops, who just happen to look like Natsumi and Miyuki's chief and the motorcycle cop and the trans lady cop and the blabbermouth cop from back home. This episode is clearly a splurging, even surreal fantasy, where Miyuki drives a muscle car and the cops are wildly trigger-happy. The episode boasts a unprecedented flurry of bullets for this show, which seems to be part of its' satirical commentary on America. The characters we know and love are written as grotesquely violent and sadistic, and sexually uninhibited––but in quite a nasty way. The perps are ready to throw down at the drop of a hat. Probably Studio Deen intended to do more of these episodes, following in the model of the time. FlCl, Giant Robo, and Cowboy Bebop all sold episodes one to a tape/disc in that era. This thing was marketed like crazy, and the advertising material for the show looks mouth-wateringly exciting and gorgeous. The animation in this OAV, however, is an all-time low for the show. There's a lot of evidence of the company frequently not even trying with simple shots. This gives the episode some of its eerie weirdness, and its sense that the characters are all behaving nightmarishly out of character.
8. 3rd TV Series/Season – You're Under Arrest! Full Throttle: I spoke at the beginning about the lesbian attraction subtext between leads Natsumi and Miyuki in the initial OAV and I didn't follow up upon it. It is definitely present in the initial OAV, and it's complemented a little in the OAV by two sort of "missing pieces" which the TV show immediately scrambles to fill in. Those pieces are these: 1) Natsumi doesn't have a love interest at the start. She seems entirely preoccupied with Miyuki, whose advances she spurns and then grudgingly comes to accept. 2) After coming on really strong to Natsumi, Miyuki is presented with the possibility of a love interest with Ken Nakajima, the motorbike cop ace of the squad. She fixes his bike, and he likes that. But while the characters in the OAV, principally Yoriko, try to set them up, there is a clear but not yet defined hesitancy on both their parts to this romantic merger. Before the TV series goes hard hetero and steps on the gas, within the episodes of the OAV it's possible to read Miyuki's reluctance to get together with Nakajima not as shyness, but rather because she has another love in her heart, which she doesn't feel she can tell Nakajima about. In the OAV Miyuki seems frequently afraid of men in general. None of this is conclusive, but mixed with the way Miyuki woos Natsumi as a partner, the way Natsumi reacts to that, and the way the two of them gel professionally and then begin basically living together and doing everything together, it's easy to see an implied romantic relationship between them. This rears its head later at the end of season 2, when Miyuki becomes almost sociopathically despondent when Natsumi callously leaves to blithely further her career. Certainly nothing might be made of this. Manga creator Fujishima frequently queerbaits his female protagonists before locking them into nice, het prisons of conformity later on. This show, in any of its incarnations, is unbelievably horny for a drama about writing parking tickets, and this ought to be expected from the creator of Oh, My Goddess! There's also a little flavor of the procedural, "life-as-it-is-lived" stuff of later series like Paradise Villa. But within the grounds of the OAV it seems not unlikely that "butch" Natsumi and "femme" Miyuki are not just highly compatible as work cohorts, but also that they're potentially made for each other in more ways than one.
Then the TV show arrives, and comes down with a crash to stop this tomfoolery and confusion from going any further. Natsumi shows up to work drunk right away, having spent the whole night partying with some random guys. She suddenly and immediately develops an intense romantic obsession with Chief Chief. The 1st season of the show is heavy with the not-gays, with almost every episode hammering Natsumi's louche, guy-crazy personality and with all the down-time filled with talk about when Ken Nakajima will get up the courage to ask Miyuki out. Interestingly Miyuki's own reticence in the face of this is not so well-defined. It's not clear why she lets this drag on so far. During a bomb scare in a department store, which sees Miyuki and Natsumi working to defuse an explosive with a ticking clock, Miyuki suddenly cracks and starts raving about how she doesn't have anything worked out in her life, she doesn't know if Nakajima loves her really, and she doesn't know how she feels, herself. But that uncertainty is never developed within any of the series. I could see how it might read as confusion about who she really loves, just as when Miyuki sees Natsumi coming back from a night of drinking on the back of Nakajima's motorbike, she could be jealous of Natsumi...or jealous of Nakajima??? But none of this really goes anywhere; not the textual het romance, nor the implied lesbian one, and the show's shrill insistence that these characters are straight seems a little like they're protesting too much. Of course, with Aoi in the mix as well, the ambiguity is the one constant in all of the sexual orientations/relationships that are the centerpiece of the show (in lieu of much policework, at least in season 1). So it's easy for people uncomfortable with the subtextual read to simply say that this relationship between Natsumi and MIyuki is merely professional in nature, and those of us reading the subtext are left to wonder if what we saw was just a mirage in the desert, now evaporated.
And yet, here comes the ending credits for Season 3––by far the strangest material in all the seasons, and ruthlessly un-followed-up-upon by the stolid powers-that-be at Studio Deen. These credits depict what appears to be the aftermath of an apocalypse. There are western-style buildings charred, still blazing at the tops. The air is choked with ash. There is an unnatural bright glow in the sky. No buildings have power. There is rubble everywhere. Natsumi appears, taking a dazed Miyuki by the hand and lifting her shakily to her feet. Natsumi is unusually gentle in this movement, with another hand around Miyuki's waist to steady her. Natsumi moves in close to Miyuki's face. She whispers something right into Miyuki's ear, and we see a kind of fear warbling in Miyuki's eyes, a breath caught in her throat. What is Natsumi telling her? Then we see them each nude, smiling at one another. Then nude, back-to-back, while a sort of thorny, rose-encrusted edifice is sketched in between them. Then in a blazing sunset, on top of a destroyed building (in a sea of other destroyed buildings,) we se them priming their weapons and looking confident, but then sharing a soft glance. The music under all this is a wistful singer's lament.
What is going on here? Obviously, the makers of the show understand the subtext you can read into it. They're almost trolling us with these credits (I actually found myself looking forward to the credits sequence in each episode of the third season. I think it's a really interesting thing they added to the show, which they really didn't have to. I wonder if behind the scenes there was some struggle over how much this subtext was to be leveraged and how much downplayed? Before this, the promotional material for No Mercy! had the two girls in tiny bikinis, wrapping their bodies around one another. In a crass way, of course, this nets a clutch of fans like me, while also potentially keeping the fans who would be outraged if this subtext became context. And certainly the original manga author wasn't above doing this for sales. But it seems to be another element, like the presence of Aoi, which the show's creators wrestle with, going back and forth on how they want it to be represented, how much do they want to emphasize, imply, or straight up extinguish the possibility of it happening. And it seems like in the varied eras of this show, different attitudes held sway. In a way, that's the show in a nutshell. As for Season 3 itself, it re-teams Natsumi and Miyuki, and they do some more adventures. There is no definitive conclusion––though I believe it's been about 20 years since this last gasp of You're Under Arrest! arrived. We're to understand Nakajima and Miyuki commit that they'll get married in the future, but by this point no one could care if they do, could they? The implication at the end, as the final credits roll, is that Natsumi and Miyuki have the most vital and important partnership in the show, the one that has to go on, even if other such connections remain only provisional in their lives. Conspicuously, Natsumi's boyfriend, Tokairin, is entirely absent from season 3, after being lovey-dovey and characterless in the background of the movie and in season 2, where he rescues an escaped monkey. And even though Nakajima gets a quick little marriage promise from Miyuki at the end of the third season, he is also hardly present. Even Saori is gone, transferred to another precinct (she shows up for a beach episode, where they implausibly catch some crooks on bicycles by skating on rollerblades). Aoi and Yoriko have a little time in the spotlight, but the 3rd season is really all about Natsumi and Miyuki's glorious reunion.
So...I dunno. None of it was necessary viewing. It helped I had a lot of work to do on a second screen while I watched––otherwise I would never have gotten through it all. And I was frequently talking back to the show as it mistreated Aoi again and again, and as it constantly denied Natsumi and Miyuki any closer relationship, and as all the inane side characters took their turns in different episodes (I haven't even mentioned some of these recurring jewels of the show, like the vigilante baseball-themed superhero, Strike-man, and the sale-obsessed moving violation called Moped Mama––ugh!). But at the same time, to go back to Aoi Futaba as the most interesting element of the show––in spite of all the retrograde things the creators do with Aoi, she remains present and necessary for how the show works. She is present in every episode following the original OAV, and present in close to half the scenes in any given episode. Her opinions, her reactions, her professional capabilities do matter most of the time in the show. There are certainly intriguing moments where they could have gone far deeper into this character. There's a scene where Aoi explains to her partner, Yoriko, that her apartment is full of flowers because they help her to deal with how hard she finds her job sometimes. "Gee, Aoi," says Yoriko, "You always look like you know what you're doing. I didn't know work was ever hard for you." Yes, Yoriko, dear..." replies Aoi. "Very hard." Then the scene ends abruptly, without any follow-up whatsoever. What are Aoi's unique difficulties being a traffic cop? We never learn. Yet the fact that this odd half-of-a-scene lives in this weird show is in itself indicative that there's more to Aoi, which we could know. And the friendship between the 4 women is always very solid and appealing over the long run of the series. Nonetheless, I would not recommend it. It often feels like a series of disasters large and small, all erupting at random. But every once in a while it clarifies into something decently interesting. So I suppose for me the legacy of You're Under Arrest! is a very, very mixed bag, with shots of interest struggling against a production company's habitual malaise. In an era that showcases the stunning implosion of the otherwise remarkable Wonder Egg Priority, it's interesting to see something this bad from the past. It would be interesting to see it remade today, in an environment where we can leverage a more critical eye on the nature of policework (especially traffic cops, who are basically fundraisers for their city or county, often writing tickets to meet a prescribed quota), and in an era where there are a few more recognizably rigorous and human treatments of trans characters on-screen. Natsumi and Miyuki would probably still have their generally off-screen subtext rather than any honest context for how they related onscreen, but I dunno, maybe if someone was daring enough to pull this off in a changed society, it might be quite interesting to see.
I did not watch the direct-to-video live-action movie. I did skim through it, and it looked just awful.
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I should also say, I appreciated Your Name much the way therewillbeblues did, and was similarly disappointed with the director's other work. I like Garden of Words okay, but the earlier work and the follow up to Your Name, Weathering With You, left me pretty cold.
