What is it with anime and fairies lately?

A look at the track record of Millepensee Studio doesn’t exactly inspire a ton of confidence.  They’re responsible for one of anime’s ugliest ever series, and one of its biggest debacles (the Berserk reboot), Teekyu, and a whole lot of in-between and production assistance.  But Cop Craft comes with a pedigree anyway, somehow.  It’s directed by Itagaki Shin, a stalwart of the industry for decades.  It boasts character designs by the legendary Range Murata of Last Exile fame.  And probably most importantly, it’s based on a light novel by Gatoh Shoji.

I’m not a fan of LN adaptations as a rule, and that’s an understatement.  But Gatoh is an exception, because he belongs to an era where the medium was very different than it is today – indeed, his Full Metal Panic is one of the better examples of LN there is, and Gatoh also handled the very tricky (and generally brilliant) series composition on Hyouka (among his other work for Kyoto Animation).  Cop Craft, then, is not a mass-produced model – and indeed, there’s not much about this that plays like how we imagine a LN-based anime will play these days.

Cop Craft is an interesting meld of influences, to be sure.  If I were to be a bit flip I might call it a hybrid of Mayonaka no Occult Koumuin and Double Decker: Doug & Kirill, as they’re conveniently representative of the last two seasons.  We have a modern urban take on fairies, and we have a classic buddy cop setup.  The hook here is that the main cop’s buddy is an annoying fairy herself, and he actually can’t stand her (for now).  If one squints they can see elements of Psycho Pass, Blade Runner and yes, FMP among others here too.

The hero of the piece is Matoba Kei (Tsuda Kenjirou, who seems to be everywhere these days).  He’s a cop in San Teresa, a seemingly American city (they have the Stars and Stripes and Miranda rights, which Japan certainly doesn’t) that happens to be on the frontier of a mysterious gate that appeared in the open sea 15 years earlier.  Through that gate have come vast numbers of aliens who now co-habitate with humans in San Teresa (is that a bit of Kekkai Sensen I’m seeing through narrowed eyes?).  The city is a cesspool of petty and not-so-petty crime, apparently including the trafficking of aliens (the fairies).  And it’s in a bust of two such traffickers that Matoba’s partner of four years, Rick, is killed in the line of duty.

The harsh brutality of this scene and its aftermath was handled rather expertly, I thought.  This juxtaposition of the gritty and fantastical has become a staple of both anime and Hollywood cop stories, so this is not exactly new ground, but the execution is on-point.  Eventually Matoba gets paired up with Tirana (and a bunch of stuff in-between) Exedirika (Yoshika Mayu) an alien knight whose job it is to track down the fairy that was being trafficked when the shit went down and Rick lost his life.  She doesn’t know much about the human world and starts causing trouble for Matoba almost immediately, but it’s clear she’s possessed of considerable physical and magical ability.

All in all this is a pretty decent start.  Tsuda is excellent (though as ever, he doesn’t stray too far from his basic persona), and the atmospherics are quite engaging.  I must confess I find Tirana to be really annoying already, a dime-a-dozen overpowered loli with an imperious attitude, and that’s my biggest concern with Cop Craft going forward.  But maybe she’ll grow on me and in any case, the rest of the main cast and the world-building are both quite solid.  I’d be happier if Cop Craft were in the hands of a better studio, but staff probably matters more in the end anyway, so I’m reasonably optimistic this show could turn out to be serviceable at the very least.