Urusei Yatsura, No. 6 - Urusei Yatsura 6: Always My Darling (1991)

The various “Urusei Yatsura” media ended from the mid- to late-‘80s, and not all at once. And not due to unpopularity or unprofitability or any of those series-killing notions. Nope, they ended simply because the series was over.

Recall, Rumiko Takahashi created “Urusei Yatsura” as a manga, and brought it to a definite conclusion in 1987 – as definite as any endlessly-perpetuating story without a decisive arc can have. While the TV show had already ended in ‘86 – having dried up the existing manga stories to date – the animation crew reconvened to churn out the theatrical Final Chapter…thus ending the film series as well. With this film doubling as a series finale for the TV show, every facet of “Urusei” enjoyed a thematically whole conclusion, with a story coming full circle by paralleling the first entry.


But demand still existed – this is that sort of crazy, devoted fandom Kazuo Yamazaki railed against so incomprehensibly in Lum the Forever. Hence, in a strange post-franchise purgatory, animation continued, flooding the market with “Urusei Yatsura” OVAs (Original Video Animations). These sated audience interest, and better yet, could turn a pretty profit. Good on Japanese fandom for supporting direct-to-video even in the 1980s! Under the guidance of Satoshi Dezaki, director of The Final Chapter, the “Urusei” OVAs are as follows:

• “Ryoko’s September Tea Party” (1985)
• “Memorial Album” (1986)
• “Inaba the Dreammaker” (1987)
• “Raging Sherbet” (1988)
• “Nagisa’s Fiancé” (1988)
• “The Electric Household Guard” (1989)
• “I Howl at the Moon” (1989)
• “Goat and Cheese” (1989)
• “Catch the Heart” (1990)
• “Date with a Spirit” (1990)

(This ignores a completely atypical outlier, 2008’s “The Obstacle Course Swim Meet.”)

Each of these so-called OVAs received limited theatrical release prior to home purchase (to improve their word-of-mouth, no doubt), making them not genuine OVAs. By many of my franchise definitions, this’d qualify them for series consideration, however…however the Japanese fandom doesn’t consider them official entries, so I’m saved from a week’s worth of mediocre movie watching.


Rather, the one last official theatrical Urusei Yatsura, Part Six, came about in 1991 as a capstone to the OVA “series.” Always My Darling thus invalidates The Final Chapter’s finality, except...except it seems Japanese audiences again have a slightly different conception of how these things work. Though it’s No. 6, and The Final Chapter is No. 5, The Final Chapter is still somehow the final entry. By this they mean it remains, in the Urusei timeline, the last story chronologically, making Always My Darling an awkward, awkward interquel, an original story wedged into a continuity it never previously existed in.


There’s a few problems here: Urusei Yatsura hasn’t enough of a continuous arc (like in the sense of the Star Wars trilogies) for a timeline to even matter. Ataru and Lum, the series’ central couple, are always together, are always seventeen-years-old. It’s like trying to force a later season “Simpsons” episode earlier into the timeline – none of that really matters in such an episodic series. The Final Chapter’s finality has mostly to do that, in our timeline, it was the last! It was thematically conclusive, whatever your opinion of it, causing any attempted follow-up to be a greedy, unwanted addition – by definition.

Always My Darling tries to get around this accusation of pointlessness by a technicality. See, it isn’t a sequel, or whatever, it’s a “ten year anniversary special.” Buh?! (That’s ten years since the show, not the manga.) Now…I’m not sure what a proper cinematic “anniversary special” would look like – the best I can come up with is some damned variety stage show, or something that’d be nowadays relegated to a DVD extra (something the OVAs could surely have accommodated) – but Always My Darling certainly ain’t it. It’s actually just another damned Urusei Yatsura story, with nothing in it of any importance.


This is actually a very generic Urusei effort, the most obviously formulaic of the bunch. Fans often call it the worst of the theatrical series, owing largely to the problems of its very existence. Otherwise, it’s the worst just because it’s thoroughly without zest. It’s boring! We lose the satire of Only You and Remember My Love, or the auteurist lunacy of Beautiful Dreamer or Lum the Forever, and without those grace notes, it’s amazingly only by Part Six, the actual final entry, that the Urusei Yatsura formula becomes inescapable:

It all revolves around a Love Triangle of the Day. Some never-before-heard-of humanoid space alien takes romantic claim of Ataru and/or Lum, forcing a rescue mission. In every instance, resolution comes from finding this newbie alien his/her own lover closer to home, at which point Ataru and Lum can reunite and live happily ever after, until the next photocopied incident of the same.


The specifics of Always My Darling are thus merely fill-in-the-blanks. And here they are.

The meddling interloper: Princess Lupika, Royal Princess of the Universe (this designation serves no purpose).

The target: Ataru, seeing as the villainess is female.

The interloper’s actual, film-ending love interest: Leo, the tofu salesman. Yes, this profession is as arbitrary as it sounds.

And really, that’s it. What other wrinkles My Darling possesses come from Lupika’s motivations, which aren’t simply matrimony to Ataru (it’s already pretty damn hard to credit that a universe’s worth of comely teenaged space-babes would take a liking to that tactless letch). Rather, Lupika seeks a love potion (#9), with which to win over Leo. Actually, she and Leo both already know they’re in love; it’s only Lupika’s royal title which keeps them apart, making the film’s ultimate conclusion stupid and inevitable and obvious.


Now, Ataru alone can obtain this Love Potion, held in the Crystal Jar, guarded by the Universe’s God of Lust, held upon Planet Holy Temple. Yeah. This is because he, Ataru, is the most lustful creature in the universe – “This guy possesses awe-inspiring lust.” This is the lone interesting idea My Darling possesses, a new exaggeration on Ataru’s eternal horniness (which manifested itself in Part One, Only You, as a desire for a harem made of every woman in existence, leaving them with nowhere much to go). Too bad this horny superpower is good only for getting Ataru through a pastiche of Indy-tech traps stolen from Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade (that one most blatantly, with the same damn invisible bridge Mr. Jones once crossed).

Then Ataru accidently guzzles the Love Potion, and falls helplessly in love…with Lupika. This, around halfway point, transforms Ataru (the series’ most interesting character) into a mere plot device, a complete imbecile capable of nothing more than rolling around and screaming “Lupiiiiiiiiiiiiika!” in a tone which rivals Jerry Lewis.

The rest of the story, about Lum’s quest to find a love antidote, isn’t even worth recounting.


Director Katsuhisa Yamada (“Gatchaman,” “Marzinger Z,” “Devil Hunter Yohko”) has no apparent interest in the material. This is an issue which has come up before, as the Urusei helmers are often at odds with the satirical intent behind Takahashi’s manga. Mamoru Oshii was in similar straits, for instance, yet he was able to effectively make the series work for him as a personalized canvas. Such a possibility doesn’t exist for Yamada, because there is no apparent intent to move any further with Urusei Yatsura after Always My Darling (“always” indeed!). This is apparently just a one-off, a cash-grab, with no greater relevance to the series as a whole, and no relevance even to its double bill partner, Ranma ½ (another adaptation of a Takahashi manga – yeesh these things are getting incestuous!).

The “Urusei Yatsura” characters were never terribly deep or multi-faceted. This is not a problem. They were founded as arch exaggerations of lechery (Ataru) and devotion (Lum), meant to deconstruct Japanese gender politics in general. Such a premise doesn’t lend itself to eternal franchising, like say the two-dimensional characters of “The Simpsons” – that program can respond endlessly to changing culture. It’s outward looking, while “Urusei Yatsura” is inward looking, with a much more specific target, and thus with a limited lifespan. And it had satisfied that lifespan, with all (or most) creative members moving on to new projects long before Always My Darling got farted out.

Urusei Yatsura, No. 5 - Urusei Yatsura 5: The Final Chapter (1988)

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.

Urusei Yatsura, No. 4 - Urusei Yatsura 4: Lum the Forever (1986)

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.

Urusei Yatsura, No. 3 - Urusei Yatsura 3: Remember My Love (1985)

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.

Urusei Yatsura, No. 2 - Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984)

Mamoru Oshii directed Only You, the first film in the Urusei Yatsura franchise. It was not a pleasant experience for him. Despite being a Part One, Only You left Oshii little room for personal creativity, the title already belonging to a wider, fan-driven franchise, with a TV show and manga. It was really Rumiko Takahashi’s show, with Oshii a mere technician to deliver fluid animation of someone else’s heart, soul, tone and creation.

Though he first found professional success as a “Urusei” storyboarder – hence the swift promotion to director – Oshii was not content with the mere joyous, comic product mangaka and fans expected. Nope, Oshii was an Artist, with deep, profound messages to impart upon the world – that is to say, he’s an amateur philosopher with decent access to drugs and Europe’s art house triumphs, your Godards and Fellinis and Melvilles and Bergmen. And so, furthering his own myopia, franchise be damned, Oshii hijacked the Urusei Yatsura brand name, central characters and all, to write and direct Part Two, Beautiful Dreamer.

As an example of how atypical Beautiful Dreamer is, “Urusei” creator Takahashi was barely willing to let Oshii’s screenplay go into production. But obviously it was produced anyway, precisely as Oshii envisioned it – at which point the director was loosed from the series, to develop his own high-falutin’ auteur name with, among other works, Ghost in the Shell and something called Patlabor 2. So we’re dealing with someone who possesses evidently no significant sense of humor, having self-assigned him the task of continuing a satirical anime series in his own particular idiom.


Beautiful Dreamer is therefore a gigantic anomaly in the series, so much so that its U.S. distribution is by a completely different company. Appropriately, then, that U.S. anime fans, without perhaps as much of a vested interest in the overall “Urusei” universe, have responded far better to Beautiful Dreamer than Japanese audiences, who look at it as a part of the larger Urusei Yatsura franchise…and find it wanting. To be dead certain, as a piece of a series, Beautiful Dreamer is a shambles, a sorry excuse for a sequel. The only thing keeping it from being a “sequel in name only” like Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the presence of every single franchise character. Visually, at least, for there’s very little of their personalities as I understand – frankly, there’s hardly any personality at all, as Oshii is notoriously unconcerned with characters or plot as a rule.

Going in, given the overall series premise, you cannot fault me for expecting something vaguely sci-fi-ish, and also comical and romantic. Hell, even dropping some of that, surely the mere sci-fi conceit –invading aliens (this summation completely misrepresents the series, by the way) – ought to provide Oshii with the grist he needs for atmospheric, unfriendly visual poetry.

No, that whole assumption was ill-founded, though damned if I know what Beautiful Dreamer is actually about...No, wait, I do. It’s about dreams, which is kinda obvious now, though it takes the movie a good long while to get there – in fact, it’s nearly two hours of surrealistic expressionism, justified at the end with the ever-tiresome “all just a dream” copout. The process of actually reaching that moment, though, is Kafkaesque, and resolutely refuses to make sense on any level if you don’t already share its attitudes. Beautiful Dreamer comes of a melancholic personality – in other words, it’s clearly not Takahashi’s work – someone who feels Truth can only be gotten to through angst and ennui and lotsa equivocation about reality and humanity and time and, well, things get pretty well unraveled thematically, narratively, you name it, by the time this thing is through.

Though circumstances start out reasonably normal, in that Urusei Yatsura sense of the word, with the familiar characters – Ataru, Lum, Shutaro, Shinobu, Megane, and many, many others I’ve been unable to identify/distinguish – all working together on a project. It’s the day before the big school festival, and they’re creating a coffee shop. Specifically the Third Reich Decadent Coffee Shop – this is the section which makes sense. In a rare, isolated example of an attempt to do something pertinent to a Urusei Yatsura character, it is suggested Ataru’s own “weird tastes” have dictated this Nazi theme – because, sure, the world’s mightiest pervert would also be Hitler-crazed, right? (Ilsa says so.) Cue a slapstick electricity routine involving a WWII tank they’ve shoved in the middle of the school building – again, this is the sane section – slapstick wholly opposed to the Oshii self-pitying approach, but something a Urusei Yatsura cannot be completely expunged of.


Already warning bells are sounding, and not just the random excess of fascist imagery. Scenes are filmed (if that’s the right word in animation) to be just a little surreal, a little experiential. The setting rarely moves away from the high school – the “normal” location in a franchise that has the whole universe as its playground – but even so, Oshii is intent to show our own urban world as a minimalist, alienating wasteland. It’s kind of like the city-bound scenes in The Matrix, and it’s no mistake that the Wachowskis were basically trying to make a live action Oshii movie there – which ignores the fact that Oshii has made live action movies, such as The Red Spectacles, which was apparently his chance to redo the themes first broached here, but beyond the stifling control of the dread Takahashi, still dominating over Oshii’s precious, precious temperament.

I think I got distracted. So things are already sort of noirish, forever pessimistic and dour as if that were the automatic way we see the world – this is what I mean by having to share Oshii’s existentialism to really go along with this movie. I miss the gigantic mallets and space bikinis of Only You.


Then the next day comes, only it’s not the next day, but really the same day, the festival still one day away. That’s right, the strangeness becomes official with a Groundhog Day scenario, the entire “Urusei” roster sequestered together into a closed time loop. They become aware quickly enough, but not with the surface level ease of that Bill Murray classic. Rather, characters – minor characters, at that – gather in a non-Hitler coffee shop like in an Edward Hopper painting, and have debates about déjà vu and whatnot. It’s all so pseudo intellectual, like a college freshman who’s just caught wind of ontological doubt, and it takes it seriously. Add to that visuals which resolutely do not follow together in any evident manner, like tent-dwelling sewer monks and never-ending rain puddles…

There’s so little connect from one moment to another, despite all the subtitled mutual mental masturbation, making any attempt at a standard recap pretty hopeless. More and more Beautiful Dreamer is evidently an Art Film first and foremost, employing just enough Urusei Yatsura imagery to avoid actually being a Criterion competitor. With all the chiming bells and casually unrelated visuals, it’s like a Buñuel film, like Un Chien Andalou, and for you to really get a sense of the strangeness I’m referring to, here is a goodly chunk of that indecipherable movie (which, I must warn, shares Salvador Dalí as a director).


It seems whatever heady idea a character proposes, it comes to reveal itself as true, as their world dismantles slowly into a morass of surrealism. As the days repeat, we move beyond the Sisyphean ordeal of Groundhog Day, through a disconnected panoply of other semi-sci-fi seminal set pieces. The world crumbles into disrepair, and soon everyone not trapped within the time loop is simply gone. It’s a Road Warrior world, our characters sleeping by night in Ataru’s house, and spending their days in the latest alien setting while they further debate the ontological merits of the space-time continuum, or whatever. “Civilization has come to an end.” Thank you, random voice which never appears at any other stage. It’s like every ten minutes we enter a new movie!

And then they’re living in Dark City! Boy, Beautiful Dreamer is best summed up by citing assorted other flicks which quite likely took some inspiration from here. There is no surfeit of imagination in Beautiful Dreamer, but it leaves one feeling so at a loss to actively engage the material. Now it’s just a waiting game to see if anything sensible comes of this stream-of-consciousness lunacy, and if things can reset themselves so that Part Three can make some sense, franchise-wise.


For now the world is a two-kilometer Flat Earth, upon the back of a gigantic flying space turtle, the missing characters granite pillars beneath the turtle further holding the world up. We’re a long way from Groundhog Day here. We’re an ever further way away from Only You, or anything functionally relating to Takahashi’s creation. Honestly, I cannot see just what in Beautiful Dreamer necessitated the use of these specific characters, except that Oshii needed someone to plug into his nightmarish hellscape, and might as well use those pre-existing creations closest at hand. This is somewhat artistically insincere, to be honest, as it doesn’t actually compliment or construct anything from the franchise; it just cannibalizes that franchise in whole, like using Avatar as the basic for hardcore pornography, or something.


With each new mini-premise entirely rewriting the rules, one can see why dreams will have to become the answer. Even then, it’s not that simple. Just who’s dream is this? Not that it matters, perhaps, as personality doesn’t account for anything. There’s the suggestion that characters are juggling dreams, shifting from one’s psychosis to another’s – yup, the germ, or inception if you will, for Inception is in here as well, but just as encased in pretentious muck as anything else.

Then again, we’re just as well in Nightmare on Elm Street territory, not in terms of anything as straightforward as a specific genre, but in the sudden artless introduction of Mujaki, an immaterial dream entity.


The introduction of a new explanation is actually a chance for new wrinkles – it’s all meant to get the audience questioning its own reality, but again, I’m not predisposed to do that (but having once been a teenager, I did once ponder such preposterous ponderances). Nicely enough, no matter how nutbars things get, the visuals are always nice. In fact, skipping back to that Groundhog Day section, it’s visually where Oshii is best able to convey the notion of loops (using a trick similar to those recycled Hanna Barbera backgrounds). His dialogue sure can’t get the job done.

Ignoring however many other strange notions of alienation, loneliness, misery and melancholia Beautiful Dreamer throws at us, if must end with that “all just a dream” ending – an ending which says it was simply Ataru’s own diseased mind (if I’m reading this right – likely not) that conjured up the twenty-six some odd layers of impenetrable brain candy. Thank goodness for that, too, for it means in the greater series story we can reject Beautiful Dreamer without it affecting things one whit.


That’s just what Japanese audiences did, angry like Takahashi herself that this has evidently so little to do with Urusei Yatsura. Hell, Oshii barely even managed to get Lum in her iconic yellow bikini, which is just unforgivable. This is kind of interesting, in franchise terms, as a perfect example of just how far a sequel can stray. It proves that sequels are necessarily products of compromise, between creators and perpetuators and fans. If one of those sides – here, perpetuators – gets too much power, the balance of a sequel – not wholly artistic, but not wholly commercial – falls apart.

Urusei Yatsura, No. 1 - Urusei Yatsura 1: Only You (1983)

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.