I’ve been completely unprepared for Urusei Yatsura. I’d expected this franchise to work like many a film series from a TV show from a manga: with one-off, easy adventures with a consistent tone. Part One, Only You, seemed to confirm so much, which is why Beautiful Dreamer is so flabbergasting, a pretentious visual poem that just happens to be in the Urusei universe. Then Remember My Love has the appearance of a return to relative sanity, only for new director Kazuo Yamazaki (or maybe I should say Yamazaki Kazuo) to churn out Part Four, Lum the Forever, and answer the alluring siren call of incomprehensibility.
Really, there seems to be no greater logic dictating how one theatrical Urusei Yatsura release follows another. It’s almost as though Kitty Films, the animation studio tasked with adapting Rumiko Takahashi’s manga to television, saw these films as an outlet for freer artistic expression. I gather, from what little I know of the workings of the Japanese animation industry, that this is likely. As assumed in regards to Crayon Shin-chan, anime media franchises come about from manga, then spread into all other arenas: TV, film, video games, videos, merchandise, food. An animation studio is then defined by a franchise to a greater extent than even, say, Disney has been by the Mouse. (On the other hand...I may be completely wrong about this.) So you’ve suddenly got a coterie of creative individuals, and the only stories they’re allowed to tell are the further misadventures of Ataru and Lum, two preset characters strictly limited by Takahashi’s love-centric alien premise.
The TV show is beholden to the strictures of the manga, but the movies are where these guys can run rampant. So we get a massive tonal dissonance between entries, even when the same writer/director is involved, because of a push-and-pull between Takahashi, Yamazaki, formerly Mamoru Oshii, and other strong-willed creative types. This barely resembles a consistent franchise as we know it (I’m speaking solely of the movies), and that’s even with Japan’s culture of extreme pop fanaticism. Japanese fan devotion prospers to an ungodly level, so following Urusei Yatsura becomes Serious Business. Thus fans expect the same comforting story they’ve pre-devoted themselves too, even while creators struggle to escape those confines. And the franchise oscillates organically in a most atypical manner.
So there’s Lum the Forever, which came with a warning as perhaps the most challenging and off-putting of the entire franchise – and that’s with Beautiful Dreamer having already embraced total pseudo-philosophical surrealism as its raison d’etre. Hell, even the Netflix sleeve advises one must ignore Forever’s plotline to get any real enjoyment out of it.
Given these misgivings, Lum the Forever doesn’t seem particularly divisive at the outset (oh how naïve I was!). At the very least – and this goes for the film’s entirely, thanks be to Buddha – the characters are fully realized, and their personalities dictate the film’s texture. This alone is evidence we’re not watching one of Oshii’s efforts. And the scenario is simple enough…at first.
Nonetheless, again we seem to have abandoned the sci-fi-comedy-romance olla podrida of Takahashi’s original. Now, rather, the premise (once an involved tale of extraterrestrial soap operatics and romantic entanglements) can be reduced as follows: A group of high schoolers endures hijinks. That’s simple enough; it lets auteur Yamazuki go in whatever direction he wishes. In Lum the Forever, that direction is to have his cast make a movie, a fantastical bit of exploitation which seems equal parts Japanese mythology and The Evil Dead. I’d actually dearly love to see such a thing. As it is, the evident reality of Lum the Forever frequently gives way to extended scenes from this in-movie movie, played out in whole. Oh, and there’s parallels in there, as a feudal village’s Oni Princess spirit is a stand-in for Lum herself, all perfect beauty and superpowers. For grounding, basically assume that Ataru = Ash.
Here I find myself thinking, “Hey, this isn’t that complex!” I mean, it’s a meta movie! Those things can be obtuse, sure, but when you get a sense for one, the others all fall out regularly enough. And so, in the group’s unnamed horror movie a cherry tree is cut down. For want of a proper effects budget, the animated filmmakers depict this by themselves cutting down a cherry tree – the ancient Tarōzakura, guardian spirit of Tomobiki (their town). And so when strange events start occurring in the real world, paralleling the movie, well, we can always fall back upon the old “life imitates art, and vice versa” answer for all our strangeness.
Okay, I thought, maybe the present strangeness is only questioned because it’s not a specifically Japanese form of insanity – though have no doubt, as an anime fantasy, there’s still the baseline pile of space alien babes (now totally divorced from their leopard bikinis, curse it all!), anthropomorphic demon monsters, et cetera, all stuff we’re just supposed to assume. (I’ve no idea how someone with no grounding in this milieu might handle Lum the Forever.) On top of that oddity is a peculiar style of anti-logic more familiar from Italian horror than Japanese fantasy. Though Forever remains forever just eerie, creepy, never outright horrific, it feels tonally more of a piece with Suspiria or The Beyond or Demons, to randomly name three of Italy’s more coherent examples of not giving a shit.
Something like 80% of Lum the Forever glides along, casually odd, making reasonable sense as an experiential bit of low surrealism. There’s no attempt to actually feel like a Urusei Yatsura movie, apart from characters acting like themselves, but with only one of four films so far feeling like its own franchise, perhaps this is more regular than I give it credit. Tomobiki falls into a deathless winter, malevolent but impartial spirits hover the film’s edges, and Lum loses her electrical powers. This upturns the usual dynamic, as she can now no longer torment Ataru whenever he, her lover, attempts to seduce others. Also, Lum cannot hover as fast as she once could, and her horns vanish – all these details are the assumed normalcies of the franchise, which is why it’s hard to pinpoint new strangeness vs. old.
So far so good. I’ve got a pretty decent handle on Lum the Forever (apart from that totally out-of-place demonstrative pronoun).
Then the Third Act rears its incomprehensible head. Scenes follow scenes with progressively less obviousness. From what they present, it seems dreams are to blame. The dead cherry tree has reformed into a lake crater, why not, and is imparting the residents of Tomobiki with waking, literal manifestations of their collective subconscious – and it’s never clear just whom is getting brain-raped at any given time.
Okay, so what’s the big deal? Beautiful Dreamer invoked dreams as its explain-away to justify an entire movie’s worth of structureless existentialist babble. How is it Lum the Forever doesn’t become confusing until dreams enter the picture? Well, part of it is a steady accumulation of strangeness: Like a heavy locomotive slowly building up momentum, Forever remains normal for so long, then dives headfirst into craziness with such increasing abandon, it’s that much more disconcerting. We’re back in Chien Andalou territory here, sans the surer hand of an Oshii to fashion visual motifs to string us along. The final ten minutes honestly feel as though each and every animator, writer, storyboarder and voice artist was separately trying to out-create the other. There are individual shots filled to the brim with Lovecraftian tentacle gods, giant sentient raccoons, apocalyptic nuclear terror, ancient uteruses and sheer hallucination. Then come the next shot, and none of that is remotely pertinent any more.
There’s also the question of what it all means. Beautiful Dreamer, for its motions towards profundity, boils down to little more than a college freshman’s poetry. “We’re, like, totally weak beings in an unknowable false universe, man,” it says. “What is reality?” all that shit. The telling is complex and convoluted, but the end result is the very definition of shallow soulfulness.
Then there’s Lum the Forever. While Beautiful Dreamer’s end is what cements it as somehow knowable, this one just keeps on out-weirding itself. It becomes like a Cremaster movie, or some other such distant work of a solo artist working in his own idiom, without a roadmap for our edification. In those Cremaster movies, the viewer is expected prior to viewing to have an encyclopedic understanding of Masonic imagery, the history of Mormonism, the biology of bees, the science of glaciers, a specific 1970s murder, and dozens of other arcane cryptic effluvia. The finale of Lum the Forever seems constructed around a similar mystery, another Lynchian mind puzzle which boils down to little in the end. It all feels like the idealized confusion one connects with Mulholland Dr., and it’s equally impenetrable.
For all that, certain critics and prognosticators, intent upon discovering the meaning embedded within (because there’s just gotta be some brilliant post-human conclusion to all this, for why else couch a family anime epic in arcana), have their conclusions. Yamazaki just means to critique Lum’s cult of perfection, and through it criticize anime fans in general.
Excuse me for saying this, but Only You did that too, and 1,000,000x more clearly!
It helps that Part One is arguably some clear cut satire. It seems the whole of “Urusei Yatsura,” dating back to its manga form, is a spoof of prevalent anime attitudes. Lum is a flawless, angelic creation, perfectionism made flesh, not because Takahashi espouses it, but because she’s trying to mock that type. This is the reason for Ataru’s extreme frailty, he is Lum’s object of desire and her foil all at once. In the first movie, whole planets enter into genocidal war for Lum’s benefit – “I am prepared to die for Lum!” – and it’s a joke. A funny one!
The only problem is, fans seemed to take it seriously. Surely “Urusei Yatsura,” the greater franchise, wouldn’t have lasted for over a decade (half that for the TV show alone) if people didn’t take it seriously to some extent. So perhaps Yamazaki, conscious of Only You’s failure to end a mentality, seeks to do it better.
Too bad it’d take a James Joyce scholar to parse that out from Lum the Forever. Though I’ll make a brief effort. Towards the end, there are certain dreams which are easy to identify as a specific minor character’s or another’s. Each relates back to Lum in some way. At any rate, each dream is ultimately about Love, about a perversion of Love, and about some wholly non-hagiographic conception of Lum. That is, under dreams, Lum’s former male admirers grow bored with her…except when they don’t.
These regularized elements start to point, ever so imperceptibly, towards a critique of Lum’s flawlessness, and further to the cult-like devotion of Urusei’s zanier fans. Under this mentality, it’s not surprising that the film’s final moments involve all-out warfare being waged for Lum’s sake. Again, nothing too distinct from Only You. The only difference is, there it was clear! There was a perfectly sensible plot reason for the fighting; here, people just start firing off bazookas and warheads entirely without preplanning or a target or anything. It’s an exaggeration, sure, I guess, but that’s a problem? Only You was already an exaggeration, one many people evidently didn’t get. What’s the point in parodying it with even greater extremes? Poe’s Law dictates that people still aren’t going to be able to figure this out, those people specifically being Urusei Yatsura superfans.
Whatever is going on here, Lum the Forever winds up a fairly frustrating movie. It again represents the film creators’ complete disinterest in furthering the fundamental franchise concept – I now fully expect something unexpected from the coming entries. At least this one, unlike Beautiful Dreamer, is made with a functional understanding of the characters. Still, I suppose I’d’ve been better off simply following Netflix’s advice (aka the “MST3K” mantra), and just letting the strangeness wash over me without critique.
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