Taiho Shichauzo! (TV)

Don't watch this series immediately after watching Taiho Shichauzo! (OAV). For starters, the art, animation, character designs, and even the stories take a huge drop off from the OAV. That's not to say the TV series is bad, but compared to the OAV, it really looks bad. So take a week or so, watch some other titles, then watch the TV series.

As a whole, YUA is kind of like the Japanese version of C.H.i.P.'s. All of the action centers around the Bokuto police precinct and specifically, the traffic department. Some of the "action" centers around things like someone acting dumb and crashing, a vehicle leaking gas and exploding, an old woman menacing folks on her scooter, etc. If you've seen the OAV (and you need to have seen it in order to establish the characters), you'll know the main story of this mostly episodic series is about best friends and partners Miyuki and Natsumi. The secondary story is the romance between Ken and Miyuki. There are stories dedicated to other characters and their lives, but those are the main to story threads.

After seeing the first four episodes of the TV series, I have to say I wasn't impressed. We were introduced to the transvestite cop Aoi-chan, who's purpose mainly seems to appear as a beautiful anime babe, sound like a cute anime babe, and act like an anime babe, but wear boxers and really be a man. But the character is likeable which is a relief. When episode 5 picked up the romance thread between Ken and Miyuki, the series became interesting to me again.

The individual stories are mostly interesting, but are aided by the very likeable cast. Sometimes, their little adventures as cops can be quite humorous. Through 47 episodes, the romance between Ken and Miyuki doesn't do much and I had a problem with that. I enjoyed the episodes dealing with it (especially the final episode). However, they do tend to act like grade schoolers in the romance department. That in and of itself didn't bother me, but I would have liked to have seen them make more progress than they did. The series really shined from episode 45 though. Knowing things were coming to an end, the writers gave Natsumi a romance which while unexpected, really worked well. And the final episodes were more serial in nature as well which was nice.

Bottom line: sweet, charming, humorous, and nice. This most likely won't make your top-10 anime list, but YUA (and thus Bokuto) is a place I enjoyed visiting enough to want to come back. Thus it gets a borderline "Buy".

Last updated Saturday, October 09 2004. Created Thursday, February 19 2004.