Urusei Yatsura: Only You

An animated film set in Japan. Ataru is an ordinary high school student. Unlucky, lazy, and forever chasing girls. His fiancée Lum is an alien. She became engaged to him after he won a game, and she will not let him go. One day an invitation arrives. Ataru is to be married on another planet and a bride is waiting for him. Elle is a woman. As a child she played a game of shadows with Ataru and took it for a promise of marriage. Now she has come back and wants him to keep it. From there the film is an abduction. Ataru is taken into space and Lum goes after him. The whole town gets involved. His schoolmates, his teacher and the priest find a spacecraft and follow. What the narrative is interested in is not love but a promise: the entire business of the film comes from a childhood promise being taken seriously. The tone is comic. The narrative takes nothing seriously and the density of jokes is very high. But the form is serious. The director makes unusual choices in staging; long silences, empty frames and strange angles carry a weight that does not belong to the series. There is the shadow game section as well. The narrative stops entirely there and changes style. This is the first cinema film to come out of a long-running television series. It is Mamoru Oshii's first feature; he made far heavier films in later years and this is counted as the beginning of that line. Toshio Furukawa, Fumi Hirano and Saeko Shimazu are among the voices. Mamoru Oshii directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes 1980s Japanese animation and knows the series. Who it is not for: anyone who does not know it; the film introduces no character and most of the jokes rest on the show.