And a mere 3 episodes after introducing the new teacher, he’s already being replaced by the teacher of Urusei Yatsura – Onsen-Mark.
Oddly, unlike the previous two teachers of class 2-4, he’s brought into the show without any fanfare whatsoever. In fact, this episode is about the return of Rei, Lum’s gluttonous ex-boyfriend who turns into a tiger-cow monster.
Rei shows up at Tomobiki High to steal back Lum from Ataru, but as usual Lum is not interested. However Ran, who enrolled at the school in the previous episode, plans on winning Rei’s heart back herself. The first half of the episode involves the usual carnage Rei creates as well as dealing with the fact this is the first time Mendou has met him.
The second half raises the stakes and deals with the class attempting to get rid off Rei before Onsen-Mark returns to the classroom. Naturally they fail, just when it appears that Rei is going to go berserk, Ran appears with a lunch she’s prepared to calm him down. Ran is incredibly touched that her’s was the only lunch he actually chewed, only to have the whole scene play out again with Cherry giving him some lunch…
There’s some wild stuff in this episode, in terms of animation. And the while the plot is rather simple, the animation itself is very funny in it’s staging. This point in the series, I think I’m preferring the Kazunori Ito scripts where he’s just linking a bunch of gags together to the ones where he’s got to work with a complicated plot too. This script is much better than the one in the previous episode. Or it may just be how Oshii’s storyboarded the script. Either way this is a big improvement.
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I’ll write more about Onsen-Mark when we see him in a bigger role, however let’s note that he’s played by Michihiro Ikemizu. He’d go onto to work with various UY alumni again on Patlabor where he’d play the trigger happy Isao Ohta (who resembles Onsen-Mark physically somewhat).
Screenwriter: Kazunori Ito
Storyboard: Mamoru Oshii
Director: Mamoru Oshii
Animation Director: Hayao Nobe