I'm always ready to be in love with you

urusei yatsura: only you + beautiful dreamer (mamoru oshii, 1983 + 1984)

Urusei Yatsura is a romantic comedy about Ataru, an incompetent and somewhat contemptible high schooler, who accidentally gets engaged to Lum, an alien princess. Even though he’s a lech who drools over every pretty girl that walks by, Ataru is uninterested in Lum… but she’s completely smitten, so she’s not going away. (In fact, she moves in with him.) Lum rocks a tiger stripe bikini and electrocutes Ataru if he makes her angry (which is often) and also if he makes her happy (which is less often). Lum’s cousin Ten comes along and correctly suspects Ataru doesn’t care about her, so he sets Ataru on fire a lot. Most of the other guys in their vicinity are in love with Lum, so they hate Ataru for (1) capturing her heart and (2) making her sad. So if Lum isn’t electrocuting him and Ten isn’t barbecuing him, they’re probably beating him up. Also, Ataru’s childhood best friend, Shinobu, was supposed to marry him before Lum came along, and she’s beating Ataru up all the time. Even though he’s a target of constant violence, you can’t feel bad for Ataru. He always deserves it.

Rumiko Takahashi, the artist behind Urusei Yatsura, has one megahit in the United States (Inuyasha) and one reasonably sized hit (Ranma 1/2), but Urusei Yatsura itself is one of many “huge in Japan” franchises that has never become huge in America (though it did become a success in many other places). This kind of wacky, long-running, lewd, gag-driven romantic comedy that’s aimed at a male audience is a hard sell here.¹ There are analogous sitcoms, like Bewitched, but the running joke in Bewitched is not that Darrin kind of resents his wife and is always trying to cheat on her… and also sometimes her top is off and she’s always hexing him.²

Its influence, however, is all over plenty of things that did make it over here. It created a template for anime romantic comedies: take an unpromising guy and have an improbable number of girls (that is, even one) become obsessed with him.³ Make at least one—but preferably all—of those girls super violent. Layer on love triangles and rivalries as you go. Still, Urusei Yatsura remains distinct from its imitators because Ataru doesn’t really have a harem of girls who like him and compete for his attention. Ataru may ogle every lady he sees, but most of the girls in this show are not interested in him. Even Shinobu’s interest flags. Ataru is a one-woman man, in the sense that only one woman actually wants him.

screenshot from episode seven (via fancaps)

The other salient fact about Urusei Yatsura, at least for our purposes, is that Mamoru Oshii, best known for Ghost in the Shell, got his start directing the TV show. If you are learning this fact after having seen Ghost in the Shell, which will be the case for almost everybody reading this post, it’s kind of like if you watched Inception and then found out Christopher Nolan got his start directing multiple seasons of I Dream Of Jeannie.⁴ Oshii also made two movies for the franchise, one which he’s been vocal about disliking (Only You). I was not exactly sure how these movies were going to work, if we’re honest. In my experience the charm of any longrunning TV show, anime or not, is usually something that emerges as you watch and is not going to be contained in a couple episodes or a single movie.

But I make the rules here! And I must obey them. So here we go.

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Oshii has said he doesn’t consider Only You a movie, and when you watch it, you can see what he means. If I were a fan I’d probably enjoy Only You quite a bit, but it’s not meant to stand on its own, and it doesn’t. The story of the movie is that, unbeknownst to him, Ataru has been engaged since childhood to yet another alien, Elle. She announces their wedding and Ataru decides to go for it, hijinks ensue, and so on. The best part of Only You, storywise, is the eventual reveal that Elle is herself completely nuts: she has a freezer full of ten thousand incredibly beautiful men because it’s the only way to ensure they’ll love only her forever. Inevitably, these men thaw out, and they aren’t pleased to discover Elle is about to get married to some other guy.⁵

Visually, too, Only You is mostly unexceptional, but it has some great moments. My favorite comes early in the movie, when we see a floating postal delivery alien from behind. It’s got an amazing sense of both lightness and weight at the same time. I could not find a clip of that moment, but I did find a clip of my second favorite moment, which is when Ataru and Lum and Elle all visit the past and watch the childhood selves of Ataru and Elle play tag. The way they interact with their own past is both funny and touching, as when Ataru wants to beat up on his baby self and Lum protects him.

This movie isn’t The Castle of Cagliostro. It’s better regarded as an extended episode with a higher budget and the space for occasional visual flourishes. If you watch it and are not tapped into the franchise, you will have to pause and look up who people are from time to time. (I did, anyway.) Still, you can see some of the things that will stand out later in Oshii’s work in here.

If Only You is an extended higher-budget episode—think X-Files: Fight the Future—Beautiful Dreamer is like one of the metafictional episodes of The X-Files that is inquiring directly into the concept of the show itself. One character says he’s living the same day over and over and he can’t remember when it began. That is because he and the rest of the cast are living inside somebody’s dream, but it’s also a description of any longrunning sitcom. The world behind the characters becomes less and less realized in ways that are at first indistinguishable from normal TV show–type writing, as when Ataru and Mendo drive around at night and Ataru wonders why there’s nobody else around. Until his observation, the lack of detail in the backgrounds has simply felt like standard cost-cutting, but then it becomes literally true. But as things progress, nobody who is not part of the main gang exists anymore and no house other than Ataru’s is even standing.

The “beautiful dreamer” here is eventually revealed to be Lum, and part of what is explored in this movie and its nested dreams is that Ataru and Lum are caught in an eternal chase because it’s what they want, even if they experience that chase as frustrating. Lum’s dream world still has Ataru running away from her. Ataru’s dream world, in which he is fawned over by lots of girls in their underwear, is not complete because Lum can’t be in it. Ataru wakes up by yelling the name of the person he most wants to see, and he runs through every name he can think of before he admits what we already knew and says “Lum.” As somebody says all but straight into the camera in the film’s final moments, Lum and Ataru will do this for their whole lives.

One of the lessons of the streaming era of television has been that “filler” television was not really filler; the filler episodes were really the heavy lifters all along.⁶ The metafictional X-Files episodes work because they use the show’s most basic strength—the character dynamics—to turn the rest of the show on its head. They could not do that nearly so well in a vacuum.⁷ Beautiful Dreamer also works because it is riffing on a solid formula. When it doesn’t work, it’s because it’s hard to square the feeling that deep down Ataru really loves Lum with his behavior in the first movie. There, I think the movie runs into trouble because it is not building on a solid foundation; it’s trying to will a level of feeling into Urusei Yatsura that maybe isn’t there.⁸

But that is an ultimately forgivable because Beautiful Dreamer is not really about the nature of love, or even the nature of a specific relationship, but about the odd fantasy of “normal life” that sitcoms represent. It is that dream—the appeal that causes you to tune into two hundred episodes of Urusei Yatsura, or two hundred sixty-four episodes of Frasier, or how ever many hundreds of episodes of the show of your choice—that the movie is really exploring. Here every day is like every other day, and misunderstandings and lost tempers and silly schemes are common, but at the end of each day all is understood and forgiven and reset for the next day. And we love these shows because they are funny but also because they become, in a very weird way, our friends, which is also why we watch the same sitcoms over and over. I’m sure there are shows out there as good as Frasier⁹ but they don’t have my good friends Niles and Roz in them, so why would I watch them?¹⁰ They don’t have Café Nervosa, so why would I want to go to their coffee shops?

The idea of living in a sitcom is appealing because it doesn’t feel like a wish fulfillment fantasy; we’re still wishing for a world in which we get frustrated and annoyed and humiliated and never progress in life, after all. But it’s also a world in which things will always turn out basically fine. No matter how many times your house gets destroyed, it will always be standing in the next episode. No matter how often you complain about being broke, necessities are never really in question. And no matter how you treat her, Lum will always be there. You can always go back and do it again in this world of infinite suspension. One of the cleverest touches in this movie is that the first person to figure out what’s going on is a minor character. Because even the dream version of a sitcom is less focused on his experiences, he is able to notice anomalies instead of taking things for granted.

image from Beautiful Dreamer (via fancaps)

The other thing that has to be said about Beautiful Dreamer is that it’s visually stupendous. I don’t think Oshii was working with a very big budget here, but he spends it where it counts. There’s a sequence where the kids run around their school, trying to figure out the source of the time loop, as they each get caught in odd pocket realities—this moment, for me, is the kind of moment that I watch animated things for. To me, the strength animation will always have over live action film making is that everything in an animated film is exactly as real as everything else. There is no “real world” outside the movie. There are no effects inserted later, or which would look totally different if you were standing at a different angle and behind the camera. What you see is what is there.¹¹ There are so many beautiful, weird moments in this movie involving the manipulation of how you interpret what’s on screen, the reflections of light in glass and water.

If somebody wanted to know what I feel like a cartoon can do that nothing else can do, I would put this movie on my list of examples to watch. The person wouldn’t watch it, because number one it’s a pain to find right now and number two it’s a sequel to a franchise movie. But if you are interested in animated movies, I think you owe it to yourself to watch it somehow.

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• If you want to watch the original TV show, it’s streaming on Crunchyroll for most of you. (There is a remake show about which I know nothing.) I will say that a lot of commentary on Urusei Yatsura indicates that Ataru becomes much nicer to Lum as it goes on and it becomes more clear that they love each other and their relationship is just weird. In Only You, though, he’s still pretty mean to her. That shaped a lot of how I reacted to the emotional aspects of Beautiful Dreamer.

• In any case, episode ten of season one is the first episode of the show that I found sweet in a romantic sense. You might be able to watch it on its own, because it’s pretty contained and has no other characters popping in.… though it is a Christmas episode and the twelve days of Christmas have alas ended. Episode twenty-two is also pretty self-contained. I watched twenty-four episodes while writing this post. It was a nice way to unwind in the evening so I’ll probably watch more, though my understanding is that at some point the show switches animation studios and Oshii ceases to be involved.

• Relevant Animation Obsessive link:

  Oshii's Theory

  There’s some interesting friction in what that post mentions about Oshii’s frustrations with animation and what I said I liked about animation above.

• Something I need to tell you about Beautiful Dreamer is that the looping day involves students doing projects for the school fair, and the joke is that Ataru’s class is going with the most offensive possible idea because they don’t want to do his idea (which is basically just “babes”), and that idea is… well… here’s a photograph I took of my TV:

  

  It’s funny in context and the extremely bad nature of the idea is sort of a clue that this is not “reality” but it definitely took me out of the movie for a moment.

• There’s some argument that this is the first “time loop” movie, in the sense of people living the same day over and over. (There are older time loop movies in the sense of “reliving a certain span of time.”) I am not invested in this argument but it is true it comes out well before Groundhog Day.

• I watched the DVD release of Beautiful Dreamer because that was the only somewhat affordable way to get it. To be honest though, it’s such a beautiful movie that if I ever see a halfway decent deal on the Blu-Ray, I’ll be getting it.

• Oshii: “I wanted to portray that reality is a strange thing. That and structural curiosity. It’s about expression. There’s the genre of metafiction—the awareness within fiction that it is fiction. Fiction within fiction or fiction that exists in parallel with fiction on a different dimension... That’s the genre called metafiction and at the time I was very interested in it.”

• Same interview: “The reason tanks show up a lot is partly because I'm a tank maniac and I know a lot about tanks.”

• Patlabor (the OVA) is next. It should be January 24, but it could be a couple days later.

1. Maybe especially American audiences who had become invested in an idea of anime as sophisticated and were not ready to watch ~two hundred episodes of a loser being chased around by a hot girl in a tiger stripe bikini. However, all kinds of idiotic stuff has become huge over here so… this theory has flaws.

2. I assume (I’m not sure I’ve watched more than one episode of Bewitched). I think Ataru is just too mean to Lum for American tastes. You might be thinking “okay but if I was suddenly stalked by an alien who electrocuted me all the time I’d be kind of mean to her too.” That’s true enough but I’m just calling em like I see em. The American public is not on your side. If a hot girl in a bikini deigns to zap you you had better enjoy it.

3. I would never knock this template, by the way. It works, particularly if the artist behind it is, like Takahashi, gifted at fleshing out the cast with various types of guys. Also, I would not claim to be an expert in Urusei Yatsura or anything. I’ve watched what is ultimately a tiny fraction of its many episodes and had a good time.

4. Maybe then I’d like Christopher Nolan movies. (I like Interstellar.)

5. It also has a parody of The Graduate, a movie I have never seen. The second episode of the original TV show also has a brief joke about The Graduate. What do we take from this? Mamoru Oshii really likes The Graduate?

6. I know I’m right about this but it’s one of those opinions where to really defend it I would have to watch a lot of TV so instead I’m just asserting it in this newsletter.

7. In fact they don’t even show up until the last stretch of season two (“Humbug”) and then really only become a feature of the show in season three. So there were a little over forty episodes just making you care about Mulder and Scully before the show let itself get weird. I would say seasons six and seven go to the meta well too often, which is one reason they are weaker, though individually any given meta episode is a good time.

8. With the caveat that maybe if I watch more of Urusei Yatsura I will disagree with myself here.

9. This is a lie.

10. Here’s an embarrassing confession: I’ve never watched Frasier past the episode where Niles and Daphne run away together because I was too invested in their relationship and felt like if the subsequent episodes were bad I would not recover.

11. The director who really exploits this quality is Oshii’s protege, Satoshi Kon, who is not going to appear in this series for a while. He also died young, of pancreatic cancer, so there isn’t that much of his work. But, while I’m grousing about Christopher Nolan in the footnotes… “X thing ripped of Y anime” is usually an untrue whiner move that involves refusing to understand how “similar sources of influence” and / or “homage” work. However, the accusation that Nolan ripped off Paprika is, in my opinion, one hundred percent true.