Burn Up Excess, Vol. 1: To Serve and Protect and Vol. 2: Crimes and Missed Demeanors (2002) – DVD Review

Film:
DVD:

Character Designs and Animation Direction by: Yuji Ikeda
Directed by: Shinichiro Kimura
Mechanical Design by: Kazunari Iwakura and Hideki Takahashi

Features:

• Production sketches
• Jiggle Counterâ„¢
• Trailers
• Clean opening and closing
• English and Japanese audio
• English subtitles

Doc’s Anime Warnings:

• Jiggle Counterâ„¢
• Sexual harassment in the workplace
• Transvestites with 5 o’clock shadows

Released by: A.D. Vision
Region: 1
Rating: Suggested 15+
Anamorphic: N/A; appears in its original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Pass, unless you need something to distract adolescent boys while you steal from them or something.

[ad#longpost]When the promo sticker on the outside of the DVD package trumpets the inclusion of the Jiggle Counterâ„¢, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from the anime in question. Burn Up Excess is pure fan service, throwing a squad of pneumatic female police troubleshooters into action against a variety of thugs and criminal masterminds, and providing plenty of opportunities to bounce said troubleshooters around and jack up the jiggle count.

It’s a shame, really, that what had potential as a quality title bends over backwards so far to please the salacious appetites of the most immature audience of anime…that it winds up falling on its ass more often than not. The story revolves around a group of police officers, each very talented in their specialty field, drawn into an elite unit inside the police force known only as Warriors, who get sent in to handle all the situations that standard police procedures can’t cover. This elite unit (almost entirely female, natch) consists of Rio, a hand-to-hand fighter with bad financial sense; Maya, a weapons expert who breaks out in hives when she goes a few days without blowing stuff up; Nanvel, a technical whiz that builds all the neat toys; Lilica, the computer expert (read: hacker) who gathers all the intel; and Yuji, the vehicle expert and video camera voyeur (the only male on the squad, of course).

The bulk of the episodes on these first two discs revolve around Rio and her various travails with money, as well as a little background on the Warrior unit thrown out between nefarious crimes that must be handled. Behind all of these crimes is a shadowy female figure, by turns a terrorist, gun runner, and seducer of men. Her cronies include garden-variety thugs, trained assassins, and a band of vicious transvestites (you heard me). Crimes range from hostage-taking to panty theft, and the Warrior squad responds to all of them with ruthless efficiency and much jiggling cleavage.

Basically, if it weren’t for trying like mad to find a spot for a panty joke, gratuitous jiggle, or sexual innuendo, the series would be pretty decent (the panty-stealing episode aside). The show is action-packed, with a decent premise, and the mystery villain plotline promises some nice future intrigue and story development. Most of the characters are actually more complex than their bra size, but so little time is dedicated to developing that complexity that it essentially winds up going nowhere. The art is also very nice, and the voice acting fairly good too (though the script calls for a good deal more squealing than I’m interested in hearing).

The DVD presents only a few extras, including textless intros and outros, production sketches, some trailers, and then, there’s the Jiggle Counterâ„¢. It would be kind of tragic if it weren’t so bloody absurd. As one of the available subtitle options, viewers can activate the Jiggle Counterâ„¢ and watch as the disc keeps score of who’s got the jiggliest jubblies. The counter takes the form of a tiny little breast silhouette in the upper portion of the screen that includes the character’s name and a jiggle total for the disc (see red arrow in the screen grab provided). The silhouette even has nipples, in case there wasn’t already enough juvenile titillation (pun absolutely intended, damnit) in the very existence of a Jiggle Counterâ„¢.

Unless you’re male and just now in the dead center of puberty, I can’t imagine why you’d want to pick this one up. If you’ve got a horndog nephew, it might make for a Christmas present worthy of annoying his parents, though, and the value of that cannot be overstated. If the creators of this series ever turn their powers to good instead of evil, then there’s every chance that they could crank out some quality work, so we’ll be paying attention.

• Click here to buy Volume 1 – To Serve and Protect from Amazon.
• Click here to buy Volume 2 – Crimes and Missed Demeanors from Amazon.