This is it. The end of the Mamoru Oshii era of Urusei Yatsura.
The bulk of this episode can be summed up in the following two sentences. Ataru and the Stormtroopers try to resuce Lum. Mendou tries to kill them.
The whole episode is basically a number of superbly animated set pieces, with some distinctly cheap looking intersections where Mendou issues orders to his troops.
- Ataru and the Stormtroopers fighting Mendou’s troops in hand to hand combat.
- Ataru flying a gyrocopter up the window of the room Lum’s held in.
- The Stormtroopers in tank warfare.
- Ataru being chased through the woods and bumping into a plot from a story that’s clearly taking outside the episode.
- Ataru riding a dirtbike across the Mendou estate.
- Perm & Megane investigating Lum’s crashed UFO.
- Ataru’s final face off with Mendou as he races across a bombarded bridge to reach Lum.
And in that final scene Lum sees what Ataru is trying to do for her, remembers who he is and rescues him from Mendou’s assault.
After all this war and destruction, the next day at school everything’s back to normal!
A great finale for Oshii and Ito’s run on the series. A lot of the staff were clearly major military geeks, and a lot the scenes mentioned above play out like parodies and homages to war films. Is it making any deep and meaningful point about war? In the commentary to Beautiful Dreamer, Oshii admits all the military uniforms and hardware present there are out of a geeky interest, rather than a satiric point. But then again, in Only You, there’s a line about how Ataru’s generation are the generation who’ve never known war and so they treat as something frivalous. Here I think it’s just a chance to make a “war” film and nothing else.
Oshii apparently was supposed to have been in the running to make a Lupin III film after he left UY. Elements of which appear to have ended up in the film he made instead – Angel’s Egg, not to mention future Patlabor projects.
I’m hard pressed to think of many other long running anime adaptations that have such a distinct sense of an authorial voice other than the original author’s. Certainly I can’t see it in UY’s modern equivalent, Keroro Gunso. And it’s not just Oshii’s voice that’s there, Kazunori Ito clearly had a big role in creating the show’s voice once he started scripting most of it. While Ito’s flaws are much easier to see now, following some of his Bee Train work, I can also appreciate his strengths (his dialogue and individual scene composition especially) a lot more too.
Finally, it’s a shame that this last production batch was clearly effected in terms of time and talent by the production of the second UY movie Beautiful Dreamer. But in the long run, that film was worth 3 clip shows and a dip in production quality.
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Yuji Moriyama changes the spelling of his name in the credits of this episode.
Screenplay: Kazunori Ito
Storyboard: Yuji Moriyama
Directors: Mamoru Oshii and Takashi Anno
Animation Director: Yuji Moriyama