Here is Urusei Yatsura, another anime franchise that confirms the standard development arc: A manga, supplemented by a TV series, that series supplemented by some feature films. It’s the exact same story as InuYasha, and that includes even manga writer/illustrator/creator Rumiko Takahashi, who wrote “Urusei Yatsura” much previously, from 1978 to 1987.
“Urusei Yatsura” is one of Takahashi’s earliest creations, first devised while she was still finding her place as a mangaka. It was a speedy success, in 1981 both winning the Shogakukan Manga Award, and being adapted for television by Kitty Films. In this new format, alongside the 195 episodes, animators made assorted long-form videos…and also six theatrical films. These films are my focus and my access point, meaning again the anime medium throws me a curveball right off the bat.
Here’s what I can parse together about the underlying premise…Aliens invaded! And lo, in humanity’s darkest hour, we turned to our one possible salvation: a lecherous Japanese high school student, Ataru Moroboshi. He prevented the invasion by, er, defeating the Oni aliens in a game of tag. Okay, so Urusei Yatsura is a comedy series, and a pretty extreme one at that. More specifically, Ataru grabbed the horns of perfect alien chick Lum. Through further complications, Lum believed herself married to Ataru, while Ataru still had sights on his totally human girlfriend Shinobu, and…well…
Okay, so Urusei Yatsura is also a romantic series, and here again I am without a paddle, as it seemingly responds to former Japanese notions of romance that are unfamiliar to me. For what it’s worth, Lum becomes totally devoted to presumed-husband Ataru, and lives with him on Earth. Like any good pervert, Ataru is ungracious, and continues to letch after anything that moves – earning himself regular electrocution shocks from Lum.
This is the status quo as we begin the theatrical Urusei Yatsura 1: Only You (that Japanese name apparently roughly translates to “Those Obnoxious Aliens,” to give a sense of this series’ comic tone). It, like many an anime feature film, is an original story not cooked up by the mangaka, but coming from the TV show’s production team – in this case, most notably director Mamoru Oshii, who like Takahashi would grow in stature and importance over the years. In the U.S., Oshii is surely best known for Ghost in the Shell, which makes it odd he’d start out as a journeyman for a series which traffics in cartoony exaggerations of the sort of romantic imagery you’d find on a Hallmark card – it’s hard to ascertain at what point all this stuff becomes satire, and when it’s sincere. All that matters for now is that Oshii delivers a most professional product, by the standards of 1983 Japanese television animation. He does, however, balk at the saccharine lovey-dovey tone of the enterprise, something closer to Takahashi’s style than his own.
The Oshii story shall continue later. As for Only You, it appears as though Ataru’s accidental betroval-marriage-engagement-shacking-up with Lum (it’s sorta not clear yet) was not a fluke. Like a lightning rod for the universe’s sexually compatible horny humanoid aliens, at six-years-old Ataru enjoyed an impromptu playdate with a different super-hot alien babe – Elle. He stepped on her shadow – on Elle’s planet, this is a marriage proposal (see, the silliness?). And thus, eleven years down the road, Elle swears to return to Earth and fulfill her betroval.
(Random side note: I nearly got betroved in Tokyo when I was two-years-old. How different life could have been…)
But back to business: Now that Ataru is seventeen, Elle’s representatives from the Planet Elle – because she’s the queen now, mind you, exactly as we all live on Planet Barack – “invade” the Earth to collect Ataru. We’re talkin’ alien spaceships made to look like roses, mostly, though occasionally also big poofy hearts or stars, with flower petals falling everywhere most romantical-like and pink-orange skies and…yeah yeah, point made. And when an Ellian spaceship captain babe in her revealing military uniform promises the matured Elle is far more attractive than she, Ataru leaps at the opportunity to bag the broad.
Some notes on the whole central Ataru/Lum situation (the series’ main conflict)… Ataru is endlessly horny, in a sort of apocalyptic sense. Hence the threats towards infidelity and fornication, which he never goes through with. Arguably, this is because, even among the grotesque male caricatures of the Urusei universe, Ataru one damnably unattractive mofo. Not that this doesn’t stop what seems to be a never-ending bevy of bikini-clad alien babes from treating him like the reincarnation of Captain Kirk. And it’s not like the series is founded upon a double standard – which’d be hard to believe coming from a female creator, though I could grant it from one of Japan’s many, many, many misogynist males. Characters in story endlessly debate how Ataru isn’t remotely suitable for his innumerable paramours. So this is all evidently a joke of some sort.
Lum is much harder to get a horn on. As a personality, she is defined mostly by her thorough, unwavering devotion towards “darling” Ataru, in the face of all his faithlessness. But let’s not ignore the elephant in the room: how Lum looks. Habitually given to dressing in a skimpy leopard print bikini, blue-green hair, perfect body…I think I just described nearly all women in anime. I can see Lum’s appeal to a certain audience (i.e. males), and of course Japan is a loony enough place that she’s also evidently a role model for female audiences.
So Lum is “the perfect Otaku girlfriend.” In fact, perfection is sort of her overriding characteristic. By her iconic appearance (I recognized the character instantly), people often mistake Lum for the protagonist. Nope, that’d be Ataru, warts and flaws and all. Lum, by her sheer flawlessness, reads more like your classic Mary Sue – and I mean, intergalactic wars start over her beauty. Minor Character #64A: “We are willing to die for the sake of the beautiful Lum” (paraphrased). I think there’s some sort of joke underlying this all; maybe Takashi and gang are critiquing a preexisting character type in anime, or even the overall gender inequality in Japan. That’s not how many fans have taken it, though, not when you’ve got cosplayers prancing through Tokyo in wintertime in their skimpiest leopard bikinis (though I cannot complain about this), or girls getting their eyeballs surgically widened in order to satisfy cartoon character proportions. People are nuts.
I shouldn’t fault a film series for this lunacy, however. Besides, lacking a perfect understanding of Japanese society circa 1983, I sincerely feel this story isn’t meant to be taken at face value. I mean, c’mon, space operas about races of bikini-clad matrimonialists each trying to out-chintz each other in their best “Care Bears” replication?! This ain’t wholly serious, to say nothing of the serial mallet-bonking which spices up the proceedings. In this light, seeing Star Wars-scaled battleships go out to commit mass warfare for the honor of a single confused engagement, it all becomes so extreme, so abstract, one cannot help but laugh.
Ataru certainly helps in this reading – and to view him as the main character, Lum becomes simply an abstract comic foil. For flying in the face of her apparent Mary Sue-ishness, Ataru could seemingly care less about his romantic relationship with an unbelievably hot and faithful space princess. The mere possibility that Elle might be even better is enough. While I’m assured Ataru grows at least slightly closer to Lum as the series progresses, here he is as wholly unrelatable as Lum herself, for totally different reasons. We cannot possibly side with the jerkass, so ungrateful is he…but we can still laugh at his extremes.
Take Ataru’s line of reasoning once he’s been gratefully spirited away from Lum’s loving grasp for Planet Elle – with around a dozen other series regulars, whom I haven’t addressed. Overcome with matrimonial megalomania, Ataru monologues to all those present about his evil, evil, evil plan: Once he weds Elle, and becomes King (KING!), Ataru shall use his power to assemble a massive harem of bikini space babes. And that’s not all! Essentially aiming to become the most debauched person in history, Ataru anticipates forcing an entire galaxy-wide gender into sexual slavery:
“All the women in the universe will be mine! HAH HAH HAH!”
Laughing is the only option.
At the end of the day, Only You cannot do anything to upset the preexisting status quo of the Urusei universe (the Uruseniverse). Not when a TV series is busy replicating the careful arc of the manga, while this is just an interim downtime release – the same issue, basically, as in Takahashi’s InuYasha films. Once Only You has concluded, Ataru and Lum must be back together on Earth – or at least as much as they’ve ever been. Elle shall be forgotten, and still single fellas! Were this a mere half hour TV episode, it’d be easy enough to write off a snapback ending. Two hours leading up to it, however, requires a little more care.
Thus Ataru cannot simply decide at film’s end he opposes the wedding – not likely, not when Elle is a redhead given to characteristic slutty dress and coy persona. Ataru likee. Ah hah, but we gotta distrust the upcoming ceremony, so…so Elle turns out to be a villainess, who actually has something like the male equivalent of Ataru’s fantastical harem. Only these guys are all frozen in off-brand carbonite – unmistakably, given the 1983 timestamp – a motionless collection of Elle’s metaphorical bedpost notches. Yeah, something here is satire on normal (or at least Japanese) dating, though I can’t quite pinpoint what that is.
The day of the wedding arrives, with Ataru forced to the altar against his will, a literal ball-and-chain on his ankle – the moments of satire I do get are none too subtle.
Meanwhile, I should mention that Urusei Yatsura is sci-fi as much as it is romance or comedy, and so things must conclude with all-out space spectacle nonsense, even if said nonsense ends with a sci-fi equivalent of The Graduate’s wedding interruption. Lum, along with her death-happy sycophant subordinates, storms Planet Elle. Because it’s anime, here at the end craziness rules, though Only You is perhaps the most sedate such film I’ve seen – the only random additional creatures I identified were mecha, xenomorphs, and an ersatz Godzilla. Oh, and also airbikes, somewhat anticipating Return of the Jedi. It’s all in service of the standard “prevent the legally-binding kiss” scenario, which is sort of necessitated by the premise.
Then time travel is randomly invoked as the final plot resolver – so randomly, I simply trust this is a regular series element, because it comes completely out of nowhere.
So be it, Lum and Ataru are reunited, and Elle isn’t so much vanquished or defeated as she’s simply left to torture her 100,000 frozen lovers into eternity.
I’ve little to say at this stage, and I’m not sure what the series might hold in store, except more standard romantic tales told through a sort of nutbars sci-fi anime lens. Compared to Takahashi’s InuYasha, Urusei Yatsura is undoubtedly a less mature work. I don’t just mean that InuYasha is more tonally complex. It’s simply that this purely comedic tone is complicated by assorted bric-a-brac. I’m talkin’ things like the proliferation of interchangeable anime babes, all of them undoubtedly well underage. There seems to be as much bizarre fantasy fulfillment in Only You as there is snarky comic zaniness. The whole perfect cosmic girlfriend thing, and to go by what I see in many webcomics, Urusei Yatsura certainly perpetuated the form.
And I have it on good authority (Wikipedia) that Only You is the closest tonally to Takahashi’s own manga – in fact, she calls it her favorite. Which leaves the five remaining films to forge their own bizarre paths, and perhaps to interpret the series’ premise however they see fit.
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