Kaede, the lady ninja from the spring special makes a belated return, as she once again flees the life of a ninja in search of a new job. She’s afraid that if she keeps up the ninja lifestyle it will make her as ugly as her ninja leader.

Of course she is pursued by her leader and the clan of tiny Bomberman-looking ninjas, and after a brief stint as a drive-thru rollerskating waitress (did/do these actually exist? It seems like a piece of Americana I’ve only ever seen in fiction), she ends up in Tomobiki.

Starving and homeless, she is found by Mendou and taken in. After she saves him from one of Ryoko’s attempts to blow him up, he offers her the job of his bodyguard. Ryoko however demands a test, Kaede must run from the Mendou Estate to the school and launch a rocket by a specific time. Ryoko booby traps the route and tips of the ninja clan in an attempt to prevent it.

This leads to a great second half of the episode where we get two comedic devices that Urusei Yatsura does repeatedly well.

The first is the chase. I’ve discussed before how the use of the chase scene is lacking in modern anime. Admittedly, these later UY episodes have a ridiculous budget for their time, but even the lower budget Oshii episodes frequently made use of the device too. I don’t think it’s just down to animation talent and budget though, the nature of the material being adapted has also changed. A lot of recent comedy manga have a stage-y feel that is absent from Takahashi’s work, likely a reflection of the boom in variety comedy Japan has experienced. Just look at Astro Fighter Sunred, that uses a number of stage comedy troupes in its voice cast.

The second device is the reversal of expectations. This does still get used a lot in anime comedy. Here, we have the ninja leader call on the help of sleeper agents who lead normal lives in Tomobiki, but are secret ninjas. The whole sequence is played totally straight, as a parody of serious ninja fiction. That is until the sleeper ninja’s actually try to do something. The first’s sword has rusted into his sheath, the second’s certain death technique is just the ability to climb trees really well and the final one has the special ability of falling.

Despite Ryoko’s and the ninja’s best efforts, it is Lum who accidentally thwarts Kaede at the last second, when she catches Kaede in a lightning bolt meant for Ataru. And so she must disappear from the show once more, in search of a new job.

A great episode, particularly in terms of animation. It pretty much feels they are showing off how great they are for much of the episode, something else that is all too rare nowadays. And despite that sense of showing off it avoids being too self-indulgent, the showing off is in service of the story, rather than an attempt to do a segment that feels like a completely different show (see Episode 130).

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Screenplay: Shigeru Yanagawa
Storyboard: Junji Nishimura
Director: Junji Nishimura
Animation Director: Takafumi Hayashi

We’re back, after a long hiatus, to reviewing every episode of Urusei Yatsura. Real life took the sheen off writing about Urusei Yatsura day in day out, plus the reason I started it (sitting at home with a foot injury) eased off. But now it’s back, back, back! Once a week this time, so I don’t burn myself out again.

What a shame that I came back to such an annoying episode.

The animation is fine, continuing the high budget Studio Deen episodes. But good grief, this contains one of the all time annoying vocal performances.

Ran has purchased some flowers that mimic people repeating what they say, but Cherry ends up blowing the blooms all over town after they have recorded Lum and Ran talking.  The blooms then latch onto various members of the cast, repeating fragments of the earlier dialogue. It drives everyone mad, including the viewer, as not only is the dialogue repetitious, it’s in this annoying, demented, effect laden voice. Horrible. I can’t even force myself to re-watch the ending to see how it wrapped up.

Screenplay: Yumi Asano
Storyboard: Junji Nishimura
Director: Junji Nishimura
Animation Director: Takafumi Hayashi

Ten becomes a superhero!

Ten helps a superhero he finds dehydrated on the roof of a building. This man is Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28.

Yes, that is his name. Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28 gives Ten a superhero outfit, a cape, a mask and power belt so that Ten can be a superhero just like Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28. These items should give Ten protection against attacks, superspeed flight and superstrength. These, Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28 explains, will help him fight evil. Evil in Ten’s eyes is, of course, Ataru.

However these items aren’t all that useful and so Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28 has to keep giving Ten more and more items with which to assist Ten in using them.

When Lum and Ran hear that Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28 is in town they suddenly get mad and try to find Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28. It turns out that Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28 isn’t a superhero at all, but is in fact a salesman. Back when Lum and Ran were kids, one of his colleagues (either Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #3 or Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #5) had given them similar superhero equipment and then billed their parents.

Eventually they find Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28 and confront him. Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28 claims that all the items he’s giving Ten are free. BUT there is a charge for the recharging kit! However he can give a 1% discount!

And so it is that Lum and Ran beat up Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28 and he leaves Earth saddened at his life as a Salesman of Righteousness.

Funny stuff, with a nice line in escalation with Ten’s constantly failing superhero suit. And also the repetition of the name Super Delicious Planet Golden Special Reserve Gorgeous Aftercare Kit #28. The Sake volume of Oishinbo that Viz put out this year clarified the joke that’s being made here, as one of the many rants Shirou Yamaoka makes is about the Japanese consumer’s blind acceptance of superlatives added to product names.

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Screenwriter: Toshiki Inoue
Storyboard: Junji Nishimura
Director: Junji Nishimura
Animation Director: Takafumi Hayashi

—

And it’s new OP/ED time!

OP: “Chance on Love” by Cindy

ED: “Open Invitation” by Cindy

I like Open Invitation a lot as pop music can always use more steel drums. Also worth noting that the lyrics to this are credited to Ralph Mccarthy, who I believe is the same person as translator/author Ralph F Mccarthy AND the Ralph Mccarthy who has written for Ace of Base, Celine Dion and Paris Hilton.

Hoo boy. I have point I will be making about these post-Oshii/Ito episodes in a bit. But first, a possibly rambling synopsis.

Summer’s here and it’s beach times again. Ataru, Lum, Shinobu and Mendou run into some familiar faces at the beach. First Cherry who has been hired to catch a food stealing goblin. Then Ryuu and her father who are raising money to buy a bikini/fix their cafe by selling ice cream.

Then when out swimming Mendou and Ataru rescue a woman who appears to be drowning. She is looking for her child, who turns out to be Ryuu. Her husband seems to recognise her, but Ryuu is not so sure until she sees her punch Mr Fujiyama similar to how she would.

Later they find Ryuu’s mum gazing out sea pining for her child. They also discover she has a tail! So Ataru and Lum find Ryuu and check her for tails too. When they find that Ryuu lacks a tail, they consider telling her that the woman she thinks is her mother may not be, but decide against it as it would upset her.

However, when Mr Fujiyama playfully throws Ryuu at his newly found wife, they all discover her true form, that of a little sad goblin. Cue the locals chasing a second goblin (the one Cherry was hired to get rid of), who turns out to be the child Ryuu’s “mum” was looking for. Reunited the goblins return to the sea, and Cherry claims he’s done a great job despite doing nothing but eat the entire episode.

What I haven’t summarised there is the thick swath of sentimentality that the makers added to original manga’s plot to fill out the time. Specifically how other characters see the goblin mother as a mother figure too, the goblins human forms as they return to the sea, and everyone getting children’s toys in the final scene while crying out mother.

Now the Oshii/Ito era wasn’t free of this, but it had more bite to it. And Ito was just as likely to add more comedic business to bulk out a plot rather than do whatever this was doing. You never got the feeling the viciousness of Takahashi’s original work was getting smothered.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this is nowhere near as bad the sentimentalisation of Maison Ikkoku in that anime adaptation. It’s just a bit annoying that firstly some of these episodes aren’t as funny as ought to be, and the moods they seem to grasp for aren’t really reached.

That being said, Takafumi Hayashi was Animation Director again, and so it looked great once again.

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Hirohisa Soda makes his first UY screenwriting appearance here. He’s much better known as a writer on the Super Sentai Series.

Screenplay: Hirohisa Soda
Storyboard: Junji Nishimura
Director: Junji Nishimura
Animation Director: Takafumi Hayashi

Didn’t they do this one already?

Megane and the Stormtroopers decide to make a student film, at first as a means of driving a wedge between Lum and Ataru, then as a means of killing Ataru. Then when they run out of money they are faced with getting Mendou to fund it (who they so far have been using as an extra to humiliate him). Ataru warns them against this, instead suggesting he ask Lum to do a nude scene so they can sell tickets in advance. This has the expected electricity based response from Lum and so Mendou gets recast as the lead, making Ataru jealous. When they finally view the film, it resembles a stalkers eye view of Lum, with everyone else pretty much cut out. We close with Megane & crew being beaten up by Ataru, Mendou and Shinobu.

This is nowhere close to episode 72, for a start there’s no cyborg Mendou shooting his fists off in a Mazinger style rocket punch. Where that episode was wild, this is stilted and mild. Far too many musical montages with little to no humour in them. And the character design is all over the place, great in spots, and just way off in others. The Stormtroopers get the best of it, with Ataru and Lum looking like storefront mannequins in spots.

A few nice parodies in there though, a North By North West crop duster scene and a Casablanca scene with some English language dialogue that puts most modern anime attempts at English dialogue to shame. And the gag of Mendou continually trying to appear on camera in his extra roles works quite well.

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Screenplay: Yoshiyuki Suga
Storyboard: Junji Nishimura
Director: Junji Nishimura
Animation Director: Yuichi Endo