AD Police: To Protect & Serve

A Parent's Guide to Anime
Rated: PG

Parental Guidance Advised

Reviewed by Derrick Jones:

This series is a prequel to Bubblegum Crisis 2040. I would call it a "Cop Show for the 21st Century". Basically, in 2032, there was a huge earthquake in Tokyo and it destroyed nearly everything. In the aftermath, a company called Genom moved in and started repairing the city with revolutionary technology called VOOMERS. VOOMERS are humanoid robots that do everything. No more menial labor for humanity. Apparently Voomers can go rogue and are called Boomers. Boomers kill and destroy and have become such a menace that a special police force was formed called AD Police. With cool guns and other weaponry, the AD Police protect the city of GenomCity (Tokyo’s new name) with their lives, if necessary. And of course, there is the ‘surprising’ twist near the end, which I thought was well done despite being very obvious. I watched the dubbed version. It was excellent. ADV is doing an excellent job on their dubs. The voices were alive and not flat. The animation was good too. Nothing spectacular, but nothing bad caught my eye either.

Parent's Guide Rating:

yellow (parental guidance advised)

Violence, nudity, sexual situations and profanity.

Violence: A good bit. Lots of gunshots and big explosions and insane robots that only want to kill you. Most of the violence is directed against robots. Some of the boomers are quite humanoid in shape though. And in the one episode, an AD Police officer’s family is kidnapped and while the wife and baby are rescued, the husband (the officer) is killed in a boobytrap. This episode in particular is one that I would be very hesitant to show to any child. Also, in the end a main character is killed (shot like a boomer) by his friends at his request when he realizes what has been done to him. Not grotesque, but even still, it is disturbing to see a person killed by his friends.

Nudity and sexual situations: I was very pleasantly surprised at the lack of sex and nudity. The main character does have a girlfriend and romance is explored, but nothing I wouldn’t show to any young person. The only caution is the ending credits; there the girlfriend is seen in rather provocative poses. I thought that was poorly done because the girlfriend is simply a 2 dimensional character to fill out Kenji’s (main character) persona and has nothing to do with anything.

Profanity: It was there. This was a cop show. D***’s, S***’s, etc were interspersed. I am against profanity in general, so I was disappointed. But there was nothing that wouldn’t be in a PG-13 film.

Conversation pieces: Maybe I’m just shallow, but I didn’t find anything of any great philosophical or theological or even cultural significance. Just enjoy it.

Rating: PG for sure. But I really liked the show tho:-) A great action series that combines a futuristic cop show with anime.