Urusei Yatsura

Original Title: うる星やつら;
Romanized: Urusei Yatsura
Literal: Those Obnoxious Aliens

Plot Synopsis

Ataru Moroboshi is a student at Tomobiki High with a talent for one thing, and one thing only: chasing girls. Despite his legendary lechery and lack of luck, he also has a girlfriend, the long-suffering Shinobu. Until, that is, a group of aliens, the Oni, decide to invade Earth. The Oni, however, give Earth a sporting chance: if a randomly selected earthling can defeat their champion in a game of tag, they'll call off the invasion. The randomly selected earthling is, of course, Ataru Moroboshi. His opponent: The beautiful princess Lum.

Fortunately, Ataru for once in his life manages to succeed at something, saving the Earth. Unfortunately, Lum misinterprets a comment of Ataru's to be a marriage proposal, and immediately moves in with him, to the frustration of Shinobu and Ataru's parents, and the joy of Ataru's male classmates. As for Ataru, he's not one for commitment, but Lum isn't about to let her "Darling" be run off, and she's equipped with massive electric shocks to make sure he doesn't.

So begins the ongoing tale of a sleazy boy, a beautiful alien princess, legions of attractive aliens trying to steal Ataru from Lum or vice versa, and an endless string of weird creatures from every corner of Earth and space.

Quick Review

Rating: 5 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2004-06-20

Urusei Yatsura is THE wacky anime love comedy, the prototype to which almost every anime comedy, parody, and girls-from-space love story owes a debt, and even 20 years after it first aired, it's still one of the best. From the endlessly amusing string of strange characters to the endlessly catchy theme songs to the endless string of parodies, references, and in-jokes, it has everything you could ask for, and it does it all well. But perhaps most impressive is that despite having only one apparent joke to stretch over nearly 200 episodes, it continually reinvents itself, playing with every genre you can think of--from hard-boiled drama to utterly surreal. You never know quite what to expect, but one thing you won't get is just another silly comedy.

Deservedly popular, the series that put Rumiko Takahashi on the map and where Mamoru Oshii cut his teeth as an anime director is more than just a wacky comedy--it's a little of everything, all squashed into a bizarre anime framework with a set of characters that anime creators have been mimicking for two decades and counting.

US DVD Review

AnimEigo's DVDs are simple, but done right. On the simple side, they include indexed and properly chapter-stopped episodes with monaural Japanese audio, a characteristically meticulously translated soft subtitle track (including notes on a few hard to translate jokes and concepts), and really nothing else--the closest thing to a special feature on the first discs is a subtitle track entirely in morse code (yes, seriously--every word). On the done right side, every single bit of storage on the DVDs that didn't go into an extra feature was used to make the video look as good as possible for a series this old. Considering that no fancy restoration work was done, the video transfer is also quite good for a series this old, though the first few episodes weren't preserved as well and so look rougher than the rest. The audio, despite being single-channel, also sounds quite good, particularly considering the age of the series.

The later discs don't include much more, but feel a bit more polished--the menus add a complete cast list for the episodes on that disc, the original airdates of the episodes, as well as a second subtitle track with translations of onscreen text but not the dialogue.

Of course, where the discs really stand out is in AnimEigo's trademark liner notes, which in the case of Urusei Yatsura are both voluminous and required reading to really get a lot of the jokes.

Note that the audio track for the episodes that were dubbed aren't included, apparently to save the extra bits for better video. This is also the reason AnimEigo gave for limiting the discs to four episodes each. (Incidentally, in response to complaints that the low episode count meant too much shelf space, AnimEigo made every other case in the first sets that were produced a double-disc one, so they could be combined to save space, but they apparently gave up after a while.)

Content Guide

Though there is a lot of innuendo and skirt chasing, it's never particularly dirty, so fits somewhere in the 10-up or 13-up age range, depending on the episode.

Violence: 2 - There's a whole lot of electrocuting and other mayhem, but it's almost all very silly.

Nudity: 2 - A whole lot of bikinis and revealing outfits, but there is only actual nudity in a very few episodes (including the first).

Sex/Mature Themes: 2 - A lot of mildly crude jokes, but little more.

Language: 2 - Mostly pretty clean, but Ataru can get coarse at times.

Notes and Trivia

Based on tremendously popular manga artist Rumiko Takahashi's second comic series, the anime version follows the manga quite closely for the most part. The original comic ran in Shonen Sunday from 1978 through 1987 (ending just before Ranma 1/2 began), totaled 34 volumes, and was the first of her constant string of long-running and highly successful series. She is noted as one of the first female manga creators to break through into boys' comics, and her golden touch has also given birth to Inu-Yasha, Ranma 1/2, and Maison Ikkoku.

AnimEigo has annotated Urusei Yatsura to death, and their complete liner notes are available online, but here are a couple of tidbits:

First, about the voice cast: Although most of the voice cast reads as a who's who of anime actors since the late '70s, Fumi Hirano, the unmistakable voice that makes Lum who she is, has only been in a handful of other anime--voicing the relatively similar Princess Kahm in Outlanders and a few other small roles. She is, however, still doing voice work, just not in anime--currently, she does chipper voiceovers for daytime edutainment shows.

The title, Urusei Yatsura, literally means "noisy guys" (in a rather rough tone), but the word "urusei," a crude form of "noisy," is instead written to include the character for "star," implying that the "guys" are from space. Hence AnimEigo's decision to translate it as "Those Obnoxious Aliens."

One other thing worth noting is that when I said above that Urusei Yatsura is like the Simpsons of Japan, that analogy holds true in more ways than one--the series is so popular in Japan that it has become a standard part of pop culture.

Availability

In the US it's available from AnimEigo on subtitled DVD in sets of five discs, with each disc containing 4 episodes; there are a total of 50 discs in 10 sets. The box sets were first available for preorder directly from AnimEigo, with individual disc and box set releases following a few months later. Most of the series was also available on subtitled VHS and through episode 80 on a limited-edition 10-disc LaserDisc set, though both are long out of print. There was a dubbed VHS version of the first two episodes, also now out of print.

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