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. 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. 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. 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.