The story all this homage is built around centers on the titular Luluco, a normal girl in an abnormal city where aliens and humans live side-by-side. She’s repulsed by the weirdness and abnormality in her life, obsessed with living the platonic ideal of an ordinary middle-schooler experience. Of course, this being Trigger, she’s in for a hands-on lesson on the importance of deciding your normal on no one’s terms but your own, and a chance accident gets her swept up as a member of the Space Patrol, the intergalactic police that keep the peace in this interstellar society. Throw in a bunch of Imaishi-branded weirdness complete with his typical sandpaper-jagged animation, a metric buttload of references both direct and subtle to works of Trigger past, and a plot that zips ahead at the speed of light to cover a entire two cours worth of content over less than two hours, and you have yourselves a hard-hitting, fast-moving joy ride of enjoyable little action and character bits that breeze by pleasantly enough and rarely cease to entertain. Weirdly enough, the overriding sensation I get from this show is Inferno Cop if it were played straight. Well, straight-er; the overall tone is still very irreverent. But it’s got that same sense of nonsensical, blisteringly fast fun, speeding through the cliffnotes version of a much longer anime plot and hitting all the big fun beats along the way for no other reason than this is the kind of shit they like over at Trigger Aech Cue.
As you might imagine, this swiftness inevitably leads to a certain shallowness in the actual story that’s just here to serve as a fanservice vehicle. You won’t find much in the way of emotional depth of nuance in the broad characters, nor much in the way of surprises in the way their arcs play out. But that’s not why you’re here in the first place; you’re here for colorful fun times with colorful fun characters that reference all your favorite colorful fun shows from this colorful fun studio. And Space Patrol Luluco delivers on exactly that about as well as it needs to in order to stay light and entertaining throughout its run. It’s lively and bouncy and off-the-walls in the way Imaishi’s work always is, light on its feet and packing every scene with enough exaggerated, contorted animation and dynamic framing to put lesser studios to shame. There’s no shortage of goofy, fun ideas to be found in its world, like the idea of a city being sold in an Amazon package or the way the Space Patrol members all turn into guns like they’re Transformers. I especially enjoyed the antics of Chief Over Justice, Inferno Cop’s emo brother, who arrests and releases people at the drop of a hat with the exact same zeal. And if you’re a Trigger affictionado, this show will give you plenty of Easter eggs and references to drool over. There’s an extended jaunt in what I can only describe as a literal Trigger Cinematic Universe that’ll especially be catnip for anyone who’s enjoyed their previous work (and if the hints I got there are any indication, I suspect I’m really gonna love LWA). In the end, Space Patrol Luluco is a light, airy breeze of a thing, not long or deep enough to reach the heights of Trigger’s previous triumphs. But it does its job as a love letter to what this studio’s best can be, and I can’t ask for much more than that.
