The OG Waifu is back. Lum has returned, darling!
Great visuals, simplistic story-telling. It’s too early to tell the fate of Urusei Yatsura in 2022.
If you’re of the age where the word bussin is used unironically then more than likely the word Lum is as foreign to you as knives and forks are to seagulls. Urusei Yatsura is probably a manga or anime that you’ve seen on a number of internet lists and you’ve probably brushed right past it, because that’s the kind of thing your dad or mom likely read when they were young; when everybody wore horizontally striped shirts, smoked analog vapes and the height of excellence in computer games was moving a pixilated frog across a pixilated highway to avoid minecraft blocks that are supposed to resemble trucks.
To be fair I don’t blame you, how can a manga and anime that is based around nothing more than a simple love triangle hope to conquer the hearts and minds of young people in 2022? Honestly I’m not even so sure that alongside Chainsaw Man, Mob Psycho 100 III and others it can capture the attention of the audience that originally fell in love with it 30 years ago.
But for those of us of that remember, likely as we rub our sore knees, seeing Lum fly across our CRT televisions in nothing more than tiny shorts and a bra it was a tantalizing sight. It’s probably not the thing you want to think about, you know, the first time your dad got horny over anime boobs, but ultimately someone had to be the Chuck Yeager of waifus and that my friends, was Lum.
Created by absolute legend mangaka Rumiko Takahashi, Urusei Yatsura has finally been rebooted and has returned to our screens as an all new series in Fall 2022’s anime lineup.
Produced by David Production, the first episode feels incredibly faithful to the feel of the original series; it’s weird and wacky, it leaves no dead air and the story moves along as fast as it needs to. This is evidenced when the series attempts to introduce the audience to the core concept of the story, the main tent-pole conceit that the fun and engrossing storylines will be supported by – the Earth is on the verge of war with a highly advanced (and well dressed) alien civilization called The Invaders. The series hero, a term used very loosely, is Ataru Moroboshi, a lecherous girl-obsessed young man that has been chosen randomly by an alien computer to compete in a game of tag in order to save the Earth from invasion.
His opponent? The daughter of the Invader leader, the aforementioned Lum. If Ataru can grab her horns within 10 days the invaders will call off their invasion, turn their ships around and leave Earth to its own devices.
To the show’s credit it is able to move through this series of events at breakneck speed, fast enough to make the show enjoyable and interesting but not so fast that it becomes a confusing, jumbled mess. Honestly this is actually quite a refreshing aspect of the show’s writing, it doesn’t feel like a typical Shojo affair. Huge amounts of the audience’s time isn’t spent on unnecessary dialogue or over-stylized shots of watery waifu eyes as they stare at their crush, no, it just feels unbelievably retro and as though it is a product of another era.
That of course brings us back to the original idea floated at the beginning of the article, i.e. do writers need to rely on the sexualization of a character to pique the interest of the modern anime audience?
It should be noted at this time that overt-sexuality was 100% not the intention of the creator; Takahashi is an absolute giant of the industry, a true legend. She broke so many moulds when it came to female writers and her signature trope of a love triangle, interjected into a fantasy universe or situation, would go on to form the DNA of much of the industry.
Lum wasn’t scantily clad because the author wanted her to be lusted over, Lum wore whatever the hell she wanted to because it made the character cool and gave her attitude.
The character was never intended to become a pinup girl for otaku, her appearance and demeanour are intended specifically to introduce an element of sheer chaos into the life of the main character, Ataru. Takahashi has said on numerous occasions that Lum was never envisioned as the main protagonist, she is a vehicle that delivers quirky, sci-fi-like situations directly to the reader and viewer. Lum is in essence a tall, sophisticated cat, if she wants to sit on your keyboard while you are in the middle of writing a university thesis then goddammit she will and there’s nothing you can do to stop her. She is a superior being after all.
Not quite sci-fi and not quite magic-girl, Lum definitely stands out.
In the end this redeeming feature is one thing that the 2022 series absolutely has going for it; at times in previous outings the character has seemed almost one dimensional in her affection for the main character - this time around the writers seem more intent on making her completely oblivious to the results of her actions. Lum has forced herself onto the center stage in all of these people’s lives, but she seems completely ignorant of the world’s feelings towards her. In the karaoke of Ataru’s life she has grabbed the mic and thinks she’s belting out tunes with the finesse and grace of an idol, but in reality she’s the meme of the woman that sang “Ken Lee”. Now there’s an internet deep-cut.
Her popularity as the OG waifu was ultimately the bi-product of the VCR age; suddenly we could tape things off our televisions, we didn’t just have to think about Lum we could see her anytime we wanted and we could listen to her shrill voice all day if we wanted to.
That isn’t to say the original series isn’t sexual in nature, if you’ve been around the internet long enough you’ve likely seen clips of the show that seem to reference Lum’s almost robotic-like obsession with Ataru “taking her to bed”. But these lines were never crossed and these scenes played like landmines that were thrown in front of the protagonist to trip him up and cause him to stumble.
As the 2022 series plows onwards through its 46 episode run my hope is that this pedigree isn’t lost on the audience, that the desire to use Lum’s image to pump out a never ending series of Nendoroids and collectible statues isn’t the ultimate fate for our favourite waifu’s favourite waifu.
As the armor on Gundams gets bigger and the outfits on My Hero Academia heroes get smaller, it will be interesting to see where the series goes. The first episode seems intent on telling us a quirky and ridiculous little story about an ordinary guy that has his life turned upside down by completely random and unpredictable alien woman, to be honest I’m not sure we really need much more than that.
In the end perhaps I’m looking too much into it, projecting too much of my own insecurities onto a studio that is absolutely more than capable of taking this character and world to the next level. David Productions have produced some exceptionally great series.
However I’m not quite sure it will be a standout in this season’s anime lineup and it has some pretty stiff competition, but if you’re looking for something that doesn’t require boundless exposition and only wants you to chuckle and fawn over funny and adorable characters then I can absolutely say you should put this on your watch list. If only to see what the fuss about this character is about.
Best of luck, darling.
Urusei Yatsura is available via Fuji TV in Japan and has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks everywhere else.
~ Andrew Archer