Going into the fifth Urusei Yatsura movie, expecting the unexpected, what I got was indeed the last thing I expected following film after film of franchise-challenging craziness: A perfectly normal, nay boring, entry.
Oh, there’s a very good reason for how staid and basic Part Five is, and that can be found in its title: The Final Chapter. The TV show itself ceased production two years earlier, in 1986, alongside the insane and off-putting Lum the Forever. This was premature, as Rumiko Takahashi’s manga fueling the show persisted until 1987 – a solid decade run. And the manga ended with a definitive final story, so for the first time in Urusei theatrical films, Kitty Films adapts an actual Takahashi tale, rather than devising something whole cloth. Thus The Final Chapter misses out on the bizarre auteurist flights of fancy which fueled its theatrical predecessors. On the flipside, it lacks a certain inspiration, as director Satoshi Dezaki presents perfectly competent visuals without the edge of surrealism that has come to define the franchise.
More than any other movie, The Final Chapter is a part of the TV show – which I haven’t exposed myself to at all. Think of it as the series finale, at feature length.
It’s a simple story, by Urusei Yatsura standards, and one we’ve seen variations on before. Basically, one half of the Ataru, Lum romantic partnering gets mixed up with an outside suitor, love is tested, and the duo remains together by story’s end. Familiarity isn’t an issue, as the joy to be had here – more than in any entry other than Part One, Only You – is simply spending time with the characters. This is more the focus than ever, in fact, with this being the last story. Without ever overwhelming you or being excessively impressive, The Final Chapter gives Lum, Ataru and their multitudes of friends each a final, decisive moment.
Like a variation on Only You, conflict comes of a marriage arrangement made long in the past…only this one concerns anime ultra-babe Lum instead of horndog screw-up Ataru. Actually, it isn’t even her fault – a clear contrast with Ataru indeed! Rather, Lum’s great-grandfather essentially betroved her away 120 years ago…well, betroved his first female descendant, at any rate, and due to some strange alien genetic deficiencies, it took four generations to get there. But the time has come, and Lum is claimed by Inaba, ruler of the World of Darkness. Yes, that’s the villain.
Well, Inaba was the guy gramps first made his deal with. With so much time past now, he’s in no position to marry some superpowered space chick. That’ll be his distant descendant as well, Rupa. Rupa, like all from his race (oh, right, like all sci-fi anime, Urusei Yatsura concerns planet-wide races that are strangely compatible), is dark skinned and dresses like a Bedouin. Yeah, they’re basically Arabs, these villains, and I’m not about to explore the implications there, because I’m not sure how it’d play in Japan.
What follows is, for a good long while, so standard, this summary is gonna be even swifter. Ataru joins up with Lum’s fellow Oni space pals, and the group heads out to the World of Darkness to prevent a wedding. It’s so very much of a piece with Only You, only somehow less engaging – Could be because Ataru makes for a more interesting groom/victim than Lum does a bride/hostage. Could also be a reduction in satiric intent, making The Final Chapter a rather more straight story, but still filled with the degree of comic, fantastical nonsense you’d come to expect from a Japanese cartoon.
Actually, there are further minor details which indicate what’s unique here. For one thing, I feel bad having called the…Darians, I guess they’re called…I feel bad having called them villains, for they aren’t really. Rupa, despite a lifelong infatuation with Lum (which he shares with literally every male in this franchise, frankly) is rather more conflicted and soulful than your standard “wedding-crazed princess kidnapper.” For one thing, he has his own Lummish counterpart here in the World of Darkness – that’d be Carla, another Space Arab, who feels betrayed by Rupa. The plot’s resolution hinges upon these two coming to love each other again, thus releasing Lum so she and Ataru can reconnect.
Not too interesting, huh? I mean, it says nothing of our central characters, except as a parallel. Naturally, then, a love quadrangle rises up along the way, with both Ataru and Lum falling for a Space Arab – Carla and Rupa, respectively. Though in Lum’s case that was just a robot clone, so she remains unblemished as an ideal.
Still, the whole Rupa plot more or less resolves itself around halfway, but with a major effect: Seeing his latest flirtations with Carla, Lum now doubts Ataru’s love for her (Lum). Okay, that’s no big deal – it’s as minor really as whenever it seems Homer and Marge might break up. Ain’t gonna happen!
But here comes that which makes The Final Chapter truly conclusive! Events transpire as fallout from this latest romantic schism, events which create a nice parallel for the very first episode! Having done at least some research into the wider franchise, and having seen some flashbacks embedded in the other movies, I know what that original scenario was: Lum’s alien race attempted to invade Earth, but the invasion was called off when Ataru challenged Lum to a game of tag, and won by grabbing onto her horns. (Look, just go with it.) So what better way to end a story like this than by creating a similar predicament, a new game of tag, to ultimately resolve the duo’s relationship?
Cause and effect wise, the scenario comes courtesy of the World of Darkness. At some stage during the earlier kidnapping plot, Carla visits Earth, scoping out what being Ataru’s wife just might be like (she isn’t intrigued further). (In)conveniently, she has some stray mushrooms in her pocket at the time – the chief flora of the World of Darkness (so much that the Space Arabs even dress their spaceships up to look like shrooms – not sure what sort of racial commentary is goin’ on here. And Carla’s mushrooms get out of hand, like in a good ‘50s B-movie, growing quicker than a pubescent male, until all of the Earth is destined to be covered in tasty fungi.
Rupa alone holds the solution, that being his pack of ravenous, mushroom-hungry pigs. (It’s amazing that all these plot developments come across as perfectly sane while watching – and compared to the rest of the franchise, they are sane!) Lum still holds sway over Rupa, so it’s she who ultimately decides if Earth is to be de-shroomified.
As per her strange arbitrary space culture, that decision is to be made in a ten-day-long game of tag. Her opponent? Ataru. Actually, this seems like a lot of narrative work to randomly insert a round of Olympic-level tag into the finale, but thus is how these things go.
We’re assured, given Lum’s increased omnipotence this time out, that there’s no way Ataru’s gonna win this game and touch her horns – not sure now if “horns” in this sense have anything to do with ancient notions of “cuckoldry.” But Lum gives Ataru an “out.” She’ll let him win, if he can do one simple thing…
He must say “I love you.”
Oh geez, this is that same stupid “character arc” which made Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen slightly stupider still than it already was. Though actually it’s a lot more pertinent to Ataru – who, to no one’s surprise, is thoroughly unable to say this simple phrase, the nearest The Final Chapter comes to romantic satire. This is the ultimate test to see if he’s progressed at all as a character in the years we’ve known him.
Naturally, Ataru will succeed in the end, leaving the story to conceivably continue ad infinitum, even while we’ve reached the thematic end. There was never really any suspense that they’d actually end his partnership with Lum, though they do toy with what exactly that might mean.
The Reset Button is played with pretty heavily, mostly as a gag. And they mean a complete Reset Button, as Lum’s parents – for random, arbitrary motivations, from what I recall – decide that should Ataru fail in his three-syllable utterance, they’re use this big honking Memory Machine to erase all of the Earth’s memories of Lum. That means, essentially, it’ll be like the series had never happened – never mind the cosmic passage of time (time as a force holds little power in this series), and also never mind, I suppose, the mass of mushrooms now choking away all life on this planet.
Anyway, the point is, they’re really playing around with the implications of finality here.
Would that there was more to comment upon with The Final Chapter, but it doesn’t do a whole lot that’s specifically interesting. It’s curious, I suppose, how it plays with the conditions of the series as a whole, but these movies have previously been far more playful with their own fictionality. (Given their strangeness, Lum the Forever and Beautiful Dreamer are much more experimental in how they regard Urusei Yatsura.)
I guess it’s telling that, though this derives directly from Takahashi’s work, she still calls Only You (an original work for theaters) the movie closest to her tone. That tone is strangely, anemically absent from The Final Chapter. That tone is a little more archly playful, more satirical and slapstick and removed, without ever being even remotely cynical (not in a series which traffics in lovey-dovey imagery).
And it’s an unstated rule of film franchises that no movie called The Final Chapter ever is. I mean, look at Friday the 13th, look at Shrek. Indeed, this isn’t the end of Urusei Yatsura.
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