Inferno Cop might very well be the best thing you see all year.
It's a series of three-minute web shorts by Trigger, a new studio formed by the guys at Gainax who brought us FLCL[/], [i]Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann and Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt. Think of it as the anime equivalent of the game company Treasure. Which would make Inferno Cop their Gunstar Heroes. But instead of the the pretty, edgy, colorful animation you would expect from such tenured professionals behind these shows, we get... cardboard cutouts sliding around like something from a pre-Family Guy Adult Swim show. (To be fair, though, they're very pretty cardboard cutouts.) Oh yeah, and the ending theme's in German because why not.
The plot centers around Inferno Cop, the personification of justice itself (complete with a burning skull for a head!) fighting the mysterious and ancient criminal element known as Southern Cross in order to avenge his family's deaths. He does this by shooting a bunch of people, following in the tracks of pretty much every OVA Japan coughed up in the '80s. But behind this seemingly simplistic story, there's layers of social satire, character development, and comments on the human condition.
The first episode allows us to glimpse life in Jack Knife Edge City, a wretched hive of scum and villainy where Southern Cross punks terrorize innocents in the streets. The police are corrupt through and through, bribed into apathy by Southern Cross, more concerned with how well their pirated anime torrents at home are doing. But along comes Inferno Cop, here to cleanse the city of its blackness, railing against the dark with vigilanteism. Later episodes have dealt with the true nature of justice, poke at the court system, deconstruct the theory of tabula rasa, and there's more to come, for sure.
