Taiho Shichau zo

Studio Deen sure does make a wide range of anime and seems to take chances on their directors. For You’re Under Arrest, the previous animation director of Urusei Yatsura, Kazuhiro Furuhashi got his real first chance in the role.

This anime is, to put it simply, a cop drama about officers in the traffic division. With many similarities to Patlabor, being about the daily lives of police officers in a somewhat quirky division has surprisingly a good amount of action and humour. Due to it only being a four episode OVA series, the animation and sound quality are superb, just like the Patlabor OVA series. Everything ... has so much detail ranging from the artistic backdrops to the speedometers on motor bikes. The mechanical detail is simply amazing, showing how much love of vehicles there are in the anime relating well to how much the main characters love them as well.

Unfortunately, because the anime is so short, the action chase scenes and the humour fades fairly quickly. Relationships are not really built other than short introductions, development is non-existent, and dialogue is rather simplistic. Most of which, it cannot be totally faulted for, but more of an issue with the length of the show. This is a shame considering You’re Under Arrest is so strong and had the potential to be something bigger than what it was.

Excellent art, animation, mechanical detail, and the lovely traffic cop duo do make it a nice afternoon watch none the less. Luckily, in the end, this show got picked up and went on to cross the eventual 100 plus episode mark. If anything, this OVA is a gateway to something special.

I'm going to go against the grain a bit here and admit that I did not enjoy this one in the least. The first episode seemed promising but it kind of never lived up to it.
The characters were all bland cookie cutter tropes. The plots focused way to much on a love story between two of the cops that wasn't even well written or well implemented. And while the animation was wonderful, the art it's self was bland and lifeless. In the end I had a very hard time caring about these under developed characters and their daily lives.
Maybe I'm being ... too harsh on this show, but it's from Studio Deen, who's output is usually of a much higher standard than this and on top of that already gave us the very similar and much better made Patlabor.