In the Urusei Yatsura tradition of annual feature films, released in early winter alongside the TV series, Part Three arrives as damage control. Part Two, Beautiful Dreamer, while a favored Urusei effort Stateside, more or less completely parted ways with what makes Urusei Yatsura Urusei Yatsura. Under Mamoru Oshii, it was an Art Film in the guise of a comic anime fantasy – a strange compromise indeed. But with Oshii now banished for betraying mangaka Rumiko Takahashi, direction falls to Kazuo Yamazaki, certainly not as well known within the anime realm – mostly notable for overseeing much of the animated Urusei output, from the TV shows to assorted OVA (that is, DTV) releases, to Urusei Yatsura 3: Remember My Love.
Forget excessive artistry, and the sort of self-satisfied pretention which seems to go with it. Under Yamazaki’s steady yet unremarkable hand, Remember My Love somewhat restores the theatrical Urusei name as something like what Takahashi envisioned: a lightly comic soufflé of romance, sci-fi and fantasy. In other words, pretty much what you’d expect of a lot of anime. Again the characters are important, their flaws and hang-ups driving the narrative. And interestingly, as if to prove something, Yamazaki populated My Love with assorted images and plot devices which seem a piece of Beautiful Dreamer, only now sensibly interwoven into a coherent surface level story.
And even while My Love starts out with the promise all theatrical anime adaptations of televised manga adaptations must make (what a mouthful!) – the promise of greater stakes and threat, justifying the cinematic medium – it also promises right of the bat a return to fundamentals: love. A cackling witch plots doom and gloom for our extraterrestrial heroine Lum (look…just…see my Only You write-up, or research Urusei uruself, I can’t reiterate the loco premise every time). These are familiar fairy tale terms – and it occurs the first two entries are derived from classic Japanese fairy tales themselves. This time it’s Sleeping Beauty. The yubaba is a Maleficent stand-in, cursing a newly-born Lum into adulthood, for the disgrace of not being invited to her baby shower. And this curse is phrased specifically in terms of Lum’s love life, and that is our promise of business-as-Urusei-usual.
Conflict established, we time travel through the cosmos, all the way to the present day, i.e. 1985. We join Lum and her beloved “darling” roustabout Ataru in high school – It occurs to me that each of these fantasy-based anime series employs a relatively “normal” introductory segment, reacquainting us with the characters’ day-to-day lives, before distinct weirdness arises to undermine all that. It’s essential in this sort of genre, though it seems formulaic when watching these things specifically as franchises.
Anyway, let’s remind ourselves of Lum and Ataru (or Ataru and Lum) – having essentially ignored their series-defining traits throughout Beautiful Dreamer’s angsty, existentialist nonsense. Recall the two are “married,” at least as far as alien babe Lum is concerned; Ataru, that horndog, would rather hit on everything with two legs and functioning female genitalia. Despite this, Lum remains eternally faithful, to a fault, even if she does chastise Ataru for his would-be adultery with habitual electroshock. Good wife! This strange cohabilitation, the series’ central relationship, is intentionally unbelievable, for thence arises much of Urusei’s comedy – and it is often funny. Lum is female perfection writ large; Ataru is male imperfection. He’s a Jerkass, she’s a Mary Sue. They love each other!
Now that we’re all on board, it’s off on today’s whirlwind adventure! To Tomobiki Town! Boy, it seems nearly every anime series (at least the comic ones) has one entry where the characters visit a haunted amusement park; this is that moment for Urusei Yatsura. More specifically, given that mid-‘80s date, Tomobiki Town is in fact an ersatz Tokyo Disneyland, and it’s so obvious, they didn’t even bother redressing the map! Not surprisingly, Tokyo Disneyland was likely one of the first such theme parks on Japanese soil. Besides, if we attribute a degree of intended satire to the Urusei brigade, then claiming this gaijin Disneyland is actually a creation of space monsters and demons and other nasties, well, it ain’t subtle, but what anti-Disney commentary is? An oddly personal attack, too, as my dad was largely involved in the park’s creation, meaning newborn myself somehow wound up in the park’s opening day parades and…where were we?
Right, so since Tomob- The hell with it, I’m callin’ it Disneyland – since Disneyland is a rotten hellhole of diabolic extra-dimensional scavengers of human misery, it’s understandable that Ataru and Lum do not endure their date here sans suffering. Press-ganged into a magic show (which is the sort of thing you wouldn’t actually find at Disneyland, but who cares), the magician Ruu starts to subtly seduce…Ataru?! Hey wait, isn’t this curse supposed to affect Lum?...Well, someone she loves, actually, because it’s a rather scattershot curse – more on that anon. Actually, Ruu (who employs a bevy of interchangeable bikini-clad anime chicks, who really are a dime a dozen) is able to trick Ataru into willingly subjecting himself to the dark arts. And with a little abracadabra, a little hocus pocus, a little sim sim salabim, Ataru is transformed into…
Ataru is now a pink hippopotamus! That’s the sort of thing I usually only see on late Friday nights. It’s evidently only a visual change; Hippo Ataru is anthropomorphic, and his friends and family respond with a blasé “meh” comparable only to Gregor Samsa’s imperturbable family. The intent here (re: curse) is to get Lum to fall out of love with Ataru, to abandon his hippo-lookin’ ass. This naturally ignores the fact he wasn’t nothing to write home about to begin with. And Lum is forever “faithfulness made flesh,” so of course she doesn’t abandon her poor herbivorous husband. And now it’s simply a question of de-hippoifying Ataru.
And that’s when the weird happens!
Actually, weirdness has somewhat pervaded the edges of Remember My Love throughout, and we ain’t just talkin’ potshots at Disney. I mean, in a Beautiful Dreamer sense, with hovering space doors and faceless Alice in Wonderland types, crystal balls and an IT Klown tormenting the innocent. There’s a reasonable amount of visual splendor, though diminished from Oshii’s work; however, by film’s end this stuff is justified, all perfectly logical. Choke on that, Ghost in the Shell!
Lum is tormented by that terror klown (another recurring motif in the more “family friendly” anime features, if Crayon Shin-chan: The Storm Called: The Hero of Kinpoko is any indication). The klown turns out to be Ruu, who turns out to be Ruu, that is, not “Ruu the magician,” but “Ruu the perpetually-youthful Space Pirate From Another Dimension.” Whoo! He spirits faithful Lum out from this waking world, through [cough!] Disneyland’s House of Mirrors, into an alternate mirror world – this too seemingly a recurring anime motif, to now go by InuYasha the Movie 2: The Castle Beyond the Looking Glass.
The mirror stuff is a chance for the animators to go hog (or hippo) wild with impressionistic imagery, without regard to normal, non-Japanese sanity. It helps that the Mirror World is thoroughly divorced from the rules dictating the regular world, where horny teens can be casually transformed into ungulates, etc. Actually, given the visuals as presented, Remember My Love really does come across as a calculated combination of Only You’s tonal lunacy and Beautiful Dreamer’s otherworldliness. Way to get the series back on track, without wholly discounting the interim entry.
In this context, where space and time seem to be out of joint, Lum beholding her baby self frolicking, etc., one doesn’t even bat an eye when a sassy, chubby raccoon happens to be Ruu’s minion.
Okay, so Ruu is the main antagonist. But wait, what of that funky swamp witch we were all promised? Ataru to the rescue! Some of Lum’s assorted voluptuous space bikini babe friends collect Hippo Ataru for a quick and joyful space adventure, to investigate just this. An inquiry into curses follows a very Urusei Yatsura mundane twist: Curses in this universe can be outsourced, and so the gang – and I apologize for having not differentiated the minor characters yet – heads over to Curses Inc. (or whatever) for answers. It’s a somewhat involved subplot, but the conclusions are these:
That swamp yubaba actually rescinded her hired-out curse, when she was invited to the baby shower after all (her letter was simply lost in the mail – d’oh!). So Curses Inc. canceled their Lum curse, now already given physical form inside of a crystal ball. And when going down into the spacetime-affecting archives to confirm this, they discover that – dum dum dum – the ball is missing!
In fact Ruu, a time-traveling mystic from the future (!), got his dainty little fingers on that ball, which has granted him Time Lord powers. By his own admissions, Ruu suffers from the following: An Oedipal Complex, a Lolita Complex, a Peter Pan Complex (okay, I’m assuming that last one). For these reasons, in his explorations throughout the infinite bounds of time and space, he settled upon Lum as the perfect woman. Isn’t it just like Urusei Yatsura to idolize Lum to such a ridiculous extent? I think it’s all a joke, but I dunno. And the logical crux of the preceding nonsense is this: Ruu Lum-napped Lum, that whole hippo thing proving fruitless, to try seducing her more directly. Given Lum’s one characteristic – faithfulness –she’s proven one tough bikini-clad cookie to break.
Meanwhile…Ataru is no longer a hippo. Like that! Boy, the loony premises and plot threads just come and go at a whim – it’s telling that this is the series’ least bizarre iteration so far. And now, out of the blue, hee is Lala, someone we’ve never seen before, to exposit things to Ataru. Things like the deeper mystery surrounding Ruu, how it’s he who is actually cursed – hence his supervillainy – because Curses Inc.’s bargain basement curses are notoriously slipshod. Again, take it as a sign of anime’s greater narrative looseness that the sudden intrusion of Lala, a Time Cop™, and the reveal that Lum is Ruu’s direct ancestor (let’s add “nascent incest” to his list of complexes – this guy out-perverts Ataru!), that none of this silliness really registers.
In all this latest silliness, we’ve passed over a major series development down on Planet Earth: The absence of Lum. This is a standard film-from-TV-show trick, to fundamentally alter the fabric of the premise, a “what if” to see what’d happen. With Ataru’s high school thrust into sudden, unexpected normalcy, everyone comes down with a serious case of teenaged ennui. Lum’s classmates have lost their verve; the boys in particular lack their favorite sexual fantasy. And Ataru (in his post-hippo, pre-Lala moments) finds he no longer even enjoys girl-chasing, without Lum there to chastise him. It’s the thrill of the hunt denied, and Ataru achieves some actual character development as he’s forced to declare his Lum luv after all.
Given this, it’s sort of a shame such fertile Urusei territory gets sequestered into a minor detour. Not only that, but it’s mostly just a montage, narrated in voice over by a minor character’s diary. Of course, there’s still a massive rift in space, time, and the multiverse to take care of.
Recall another time-honored fact about most anime franchises: They gotta hit the reset button pretty hard at the end, lest they harm the TV show. Nothing too shocking there. So Ataru, under Lala’s expository care, sets out to enter the nether-realms of the universe through Disneyland’s mystic portal. How will he defeat Ruu? I ask this only because the answer is the same as always: Love, with a capital L-O-V-E™. But seriously, name me an anime that doesn’t bow to the ultimate power of love as its plot resolver. (Okay, it’s not that pervasive, but it’s pretty danged common.) Given a separation of light-years, eons, logical paradoxes and the omnipotent forces of a dark heathen god, still LOVE is the most dread force in all existences!
Of course, it’s more so in Urusei Yatsura, as this series is founded upon Love first and foremost. So I have no reservations about this excess of exaggerated emotion. That it’s Ataru’s Love that resolves the story is notable. This is when he personally has nothing riding on this, besides that Love. This is a long way from Only You, where Ataru was actively trying to form a space harem, and Lum basically beats him up at the end.
So Urusei Yatsura is back on track, following Remember Me’s course resetting actions. But with Oshii now permanently ejected, and Yamazaki sticking around, where is the series headed? In the last two films, the franchise has embraced surrealism, quite unlike the manga – from what I can tell, a more lighthearted product. Of course, the central thematic notion remains, as do the characters and the tone…mostly. Now it’s just a question of how many different ways the writers can toy with Lum and Ataru.
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