エンジェルコップ

ANGEL COP

OVA

STATUS
COMPLETE
EPISODES
6
RELEASE
May 20, 1994
LENGTH
30 min

DESCRIPTION

Sometime in the future, terrorism in Japan has become commonplace, and the police have become almost as brutal as criminals. One cop, known as Angel, is the best of the best, stopping at nothing in her fight for justice. Things get interesting for Angel Cop and her new partner when they begin investigating a series of murders in which the victims are other criminals, killed in very unpleasant ways. These criminals, a group of psychics that banded together to hunt down the lowest scum in the city, and bring them to justice. After a couple of encounters between the cops and the psychics, two of the psychics begin to think that maybe they're not the good guys after all, but the third prefers killing to morality. Augmented by cybernetics from a mysterious source, he heads out on a killing spree, with Angel as his first target. Even with help from the other two psychics and her newly cyborged partner (after an unfortunate accident), Angel is going to have her work cut out trying to find the rogue psychic and the organization behind him.

CAST

Angel
Mika Doi
Lucifer
Kumiko Hironaka
Sakada Raiden
Masashi Ebara
Peace
Rei Sakuma
Asra
Nozomu Sasaki
Taki Haishyo
Kenji Utsumi
Freya
Yuuko Mizutani
Tachihara
Toshihiko Seki
Tokawa
Tesshou Genda
Hacker
Akio Ootsuka
Kuwata
Mikio Terashima
Maisaka
Osamu Saka
Ichihara
Kouichi Kitamura
Narrator
Masaaki Yajima

EPISODES

Dubbed

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Not available on crunchyroll

RELATED TO ANGEL COP

MANGA ActionAngel Cop

REVIEWS

Gakko
40/100
Without relevant characters and a coherent story, it feels like animation homework than a serious story to be told.
Angel Cop is what I've been noticing in my journey through 1980's-1990's action-filled OVAs: A lot of political drama where many times you haven't been given any background or development to the main characters, but the whole political or military plot is exposed in the smallest of details.

I can't say why this seems predominant, maybe it's just an impression I got. This sort of thing happens in the Patlabor movies, in Ghost in the Shell, Akira and Kidou Senshi Zeta Gundam. And in all of those, you get enough about everything else to compensate it, since you often have characters that you can read. Sometimes, however, you just have to ask why a specific work was created. What is the thing that Angel Cop wants to show its audience?

The characters in Angel Cop, for instance, are the most superficial you could ever ask for. Sakada Raiden seems to be the protagonist at first, someone who believes in the law and is ready to capture (rather than kill) the communist terrorist members who are currently engaged against Japan. However, he is only there for Angel's reveal, whose history and background are left practically to the audience's imagination and have no qualms about executing criminals on the spot (something that is widely accepted in this story's world).

In a confused mess of a plot, you are treated to plot twists and intrigue that end up not making you care in the slightest. Here you have a Japan that is expected to become of the most important economical players in the global scenery rivaling the U.S., but is being plagued by terrorism and political corruption, likely enticed by foreign powers such as the URSS, U.S. and China. The OVA portrays torture, excessive gore and summary execution of individuals, which makes you predict a story based on a discussion about the ethic and the moral thing to do versus what the main characters are hired to do, but the whole thing falls apart when the story introduces psychic vigilante groups who are also hunting down the same terrorist organizations that the law enforcement is engaging.

This, along with corporate and political scheming, seems to cause complete chaos: suddenly, the country's own law enforcement is hunting down S.S.F. (the division Angel and Raiden are a part of). Not to mention betrayals and "the vigilantes are the bad guys until some of them aren't" and so on. The impression that I got is that the writer (or writers) just shoved a lot of ideas and political leanings into a blender and dumped it into animation. There is no coherent narrative, and many of the torture scenes, exposition dialogue and conflict seems to "just happen".

This is what I could call the edgiest anime I've seen so far. You have graphic and disgusting methods of torture, killings with a lot of gore, nudity and the use of children as assassins, not to mention a lot of questionable dialogue, like the instance where an antagonist is a Jew bent on "dominating the world" and actually saying they plan on "wiping out trash races". You have anti-U.S., anti-consumerism and anti-capitalist expositions which tie well to the overall nationalistic nature of this OVA, as is very explicitly written, for the viewer, in its epilogue slides about the fate of Japan and its "decadence".

What I felt after finishing Angel Cop? That I have just watched a fan-fiction written online by a teenager who desperately wants to be seem as a mature adult, combined with a sort of manifesto someone who spent too much time alone and in distress to let themselves be caught in a radicalizing narrative to justify all their frustration. All of that injected in some cyberpunk story that has no heads or tails.

If you're looking for the "aesthetic" factor of 1980's artstyle and moody, urban scenes, you'll end up disappointed as well, since many of the scenery shots are lifeless and basic-looking. Overall, I feel like it was not worth my time, and considering it already seems rather obscure, probably not many felt like it is.
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