Name(s): AD Police / A.D. Police / ADポリス / AD Police Files / AD.Police / AD.Police
Studio(s): AIC / Artmic

AD Police is a spin-off OVA of Bubblegum Crisis. Though Bubblegum Crisis was ostensibly a cyberpunk work, it stayed true to the first half of its name by always wearing a smile that still showed joy in a dystopian future. That balance of playfulness with grit is all but gone in AD Police, a prequel chronicle of the Neo Tokyo Metropolitan Police force before Bubblegum Crisis‘s Knight Sabers hit the scene.

This is perhaps a suitable tonal shift, as the Knight Sabers were shown to be just about the only force that could surpass Boomers, cyborgs that can occasionally go berserk and threaten the human populace. The AD Police are fighting the newest evolution in combat technology with outdated means, and this means a lot more gore is shed, the death count goes up, and pessimism is palpable in the environment.

By all means, this is a sensible spin-off. It’s extremely loosely connected to the events of Bubblegum Crisis because of some returning names, and the only name of those belonging to a human is Leon McNichol. Leon’s professional inexperience and new character design make him nigh unrecognizable compared to what he’d become (or was) in Bubblegum Crisis.

That this OVA doesn’t introduce anything that contradicts the world of characters of Bubblegum Crisis is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. By taking almost no risk in mixing these OVAs, AD Police sets up no expectations of it being the same as Bubblegum Crisis, and its tonal shift doesn’t conflict with Bubblegum Crisis because the two are so easily compartmentalized when seen side by side. In other words, AD Police clearly doesn’t possess the same appeal as Bubblegum Crisis and doesn’t try to. The two OVAs are so aesthetically far apart and unrelated in story and characters that neither weaken or strengthen each other.

Even the potential insight into Bubblegum Crisis‘s setting has little to offer here. This isn’t to say AD Police‘s world is dull, but that it once again focuses on highly specific elements of that world that go further to make it unique while also not filling in anything Bubblegum Crisis put forth.

For instance, though both possess Boomers as primary antagonists they’re utilized very differently. Bubblegum Crisis practically treated the Boomers as monsters; not the merging of humans and machines they’re meant to be, but rather machines only built to visually resemble humans. Bubblegum Crisis deals with the morality of the people taking advantage of Boomer technology and not the Boomers themselves. They are essentially automatons in the skin of humans despite being called cyborgs.

AD Police focuses entirely on the characters within the Boomers themselves. Here they have individuality and every episode posits what separates a machine from a human being, this being the source of the Boomers’ new emotional struggle. It’s an ancient science-fiction topic and AD Police doesn’t add anything striking or fresh to the discussion, but you can see that while both OVAs share cyborgs with the same name, you are immediately taught to see them differently. The contrast with Bubblegum Crisis isn’t off-putting to either precisely because they’re just so hard to see in the same world, but that also means this spin-off doesn’t really feel like it adds anything.

So, if this likely isn’t of particular interest to someone looking for more of the Bubblegum Crisis world, does AD Police hold up on its own? That debate is probably less ambiguous. As a science fiction and cyberpunk fan, nothing about AD Police stands out to me. It’s not completely brainless but it’s hardly high concept either. The atmosphere and animation quality could freshen up its worn ideas with striking presentation, but those run cold as well, and not for the good reasons you’d hope from a dystopian work.

While it’s not easy to completely judge this compared to Bubblegum Crisis as that had a Blu-ray release while AD Police is stuck on DVD, this series in general just feels a hell of a lot cheaper. Maybe it’s a difference of talent, but character designs are frequently off-model, shortcuts are taken during action scenes like painted stills, and there’s even the rare flub like completely inaccurate lip syncing. The painted backgrounds are quite nice, but you get repetitive glances of the always green-toned city that quickly cease to impress. When the characters are drawn on-model they possess a simple digital coloring job that has little on the detailed textures of Bubblegum Crisis that popped out at you.

As for the writing, well, AD Police is greatly disadvantaged there. Because this was based on the Bubblegum Crisis IP, the same copyright dispute that ended that OVA prematurely did the same thing here. AD Police wasn’t meant to end at three episodes, and with that in mind it makes its weaknesses more forgivable, but they don’t go away.

Even the main characters Leon and Gina don’t get enough attention to flourish as the episodic stories feature new supporting casts each time that are used intensively to set up an entirely new storyline based on nothing before it. Leon has no character arc—he even barely gets to use any of his signature humor. We don’t get to see him grow into one of the most respected policemen in his force, and we hardly even get to see him so much as struggle.

His superior, Gina, is meant to contrast with his inexperience and lack of confidence, but she’s only slightly better. Gina at least has a conflict with how she feels her artificial arm makes her less human, something brought up multiple times.

This conflict is difficult to feel the drama of, as she’s dramatizing over what essentially, to the audience, is just a movable prosthetic arm. She never has to consider the ramifications of becoming more of a cyborg since she’s never injured again, and a single replaced arm is hardly robbing you of entire human sensations. Hell, it doesn’t even rob you of having an arm—she has another one. Naturally, it’s possible this was intended to go somewhere but this is as far as it’s taken, so conflating this conflict with full cyberization is hyperbolic at best.

Like I mentioned earlier, the individual stories largely deal with Boomers struggling with their emotions and going berserk. For the first two episodes the structure is largely procedural, with the antagonist’s background story and motivations only becoming clear after the problem’s already been dealt with.

This robs the development of the stories of a lot of tension, especially since we aren’t set up to really care about Leon or Gina as we watch them put their lives on the line during the investigations. By far the best episode of the lot is the final one, “The Man Who Bites His Tongue,” turning Robocop into a horror story as a police member loses his body in a fight and has his brain planted in a robotic body.

The first minute or two sets up more empathy for this character than anything else in the entire OVA, showing pictures of his time as a human on the force to get a view of the amount of life he had to give when he was still able to. The preceding themes of humanity persisting in machines via the senses and emotions are a more constant focus because the lens is constantly on the character having to deal with them rather than tossing it all on us in the last three minutes.

In other words, this character, Billy Fanword, is the only one in the OVA with a complete character development arc where you can understand all of his motivations and ways of thinking, which garners enough empathy to actually motivate the ambiguous philosophical discussions the OVA is always going for. It’s still not too nuanced, but it’s something.

The OVA also has a bit of a misogynistic streak. Nothing too awful, but nonetheless eyerolling. Every single female character is very willing to throw themselves at a male one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I went back and saw that not a single female character didn’t get nude at some point for no reason. Even if it’s trying to appear more adult, it’s doing so in a biased way.

If I were to give it the benefit of the doubt because the objectification of women being common in cyberpunk and noir (though usually as the result of other characters or their environment), that still means it’s indulging in a stock trope. It’s doing it for the benefit of nothing other than tits, since there’s no subtext about women as a demographic minority in this setting.

So, I’m at a loss. I don’t feel like this is a “proper” expansion of Bubblegum Crisis since it succeeds (and fails) entirely by its unique metrics, so I can’t recommend this to someone based on them loving that setting. For sci-fi fans, this can’t hold an electronic candle to Ghost in the Shell’s pontificating, and as far as I can tell it fails to present ideas that aren’t done elsewhere better.

As a gluttonous OVA consumer myself, this is a bit lacking in the things I’ve come to love from that generation. The animation quality doesn’t stand out, and the cheesy synth score is too bland to have the kitschy charm of other contemporaries. It does have that “alternative” attitude, though. You can see it done with more panache in many other OVAs, but if you can’t get enough of that gutsy unrestrained spirit of the era then AD Police should offer enough gore, sex, and general pulp to mildly satisfy you.