General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20264 min read

Urusei Yatsura: The Movie

Urusei Yatsura: The Movie, released in Japan as Urusei Yatsura: Only You (うる星やつらオンリー・ユー), is a 1983 Japanese animated science-fiction romantic comedy and the first theatrical film based on Rumiko Takahashi's manga and anime series Urusei Yatsura. It premiered on February 11, 1983, distributed by Toho, and was the theatrical directorial debut of Mamoru Oshii, who had been chief director of the television series.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Japanese release	February 11, 1983, Toho distribution¹
Position in series	First theatrical film of the Urusei Yatsura franchise, following the TV anime that began in 1981¹^•²
Director	Mamoru Oshii, his theatrical debut; he also handled the adaptation and storyboards¹^•³
Screenplay	Tomoko Konparu, from Takahashi's original³
Original character	Elle, the film's antagonist, was drawn for the film by Rumiko Takahashi herself¹
Main cast	Fumi Hirano (Lum), Toshio Furukawa (Ataru), Yoshiko Sakakibara (Elle)¹
Music	Kotomi Kobayashi, Yasuaki Anzai, and Masamichi Amano; an early major commercial use of the Fairlight CMI in Japan³^•⁴

Spoilers

Story

Invitations arrive in Tomobiki town announcing the wedding of Ataru Moroboshi to a mysterious woman named Elle. Ataru has no memory of any such engagement, but when he hears that Elle is beautiful he runs to her as usual, while Lum and the townspeople pursue him into space, and the contest over Ataru escalates toward interplanetary war.¹

The premise rests on a childhood incident: eleven years earlier, six-year-old Ataru stepped on Elle's shadow during a game of shadow-tag, which in the culture of her planet counts as a marriage proposal.⁷ Elle, who came to Earth as a child, is now the queen of her world, and Mendo discovers that her sanctuary holds a frozen vault of 100,000 young men she has collected from across the universe; Ataru's wedding preparations proceed until Lum's counterattack rescues him.⁸ The closing wedding scene pays homage to Mike Nichols's 1967 film The Graduate.⁸

Production

The film was produced under Kitty Film with the cooperation of Studio Pierrot; Hidenori Taga produced, Shigekazu Ochiai planned, and Yuji Nunokawa served as animation producer.³^•⁵ Character design was shared by Akemi Takada and Magoichi Takizawa, and Takashi Anno handled episode direction.³ According to a Japanese fan wiki account of the production, when Oshii joined, only Takahashi's illustrations of the new character Elle, a few mecha designs, and a completed script existed, with five months left before the deadline.⁶

The score used the Fairlight CMI, an early digital music workstation. A Japanese music-industry history identifies the film's music by Yasuaki Anzai as the first full-scale commercial use of the Fairlight CMI in Japanese film music, a year before Joe Hisaishi used it for part of the score of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984).⁴ The theme song was "I, I, You & 愛", written, composed, arranged, and performed by Kotomi Kobayashi, with insert songs including "Lum's Ballad" sung by Fumi Hirano.⁵

Reception and legacy

Contemporary reactions were mixed. The director Juzo Itami, after seeing the film, described it as "a sweet movie, like a sugary cake confection", and Hayao Miyazaki criticized it when the two directors met for their first conversation, which was published in Animage in 1983.⁶^•⁹ Oshii was also struck by how much freer the co-featured live-action film, Shinji Sōmai's Shonben Rider, was as a director's work.⁶

The film established the format the later Urusei Yatsura movies followed, in which the status quo of Lum and Ataru's relationship is threatened by an outside force, and it introduced the original-story approach the theatrical series kept through its fourth installment.¹⁰^•¹¹ A Japanese animation history notes that while its reception at release was one thing, later assessments rank Oshii's second film, Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984), above it.¹² Critics have also noted early traces of Oshii's later visual signature, such as static, precisely framed compositions and imagery of petals falling from the sky that recalls scenes in Patlabor 2.¹⁰

Versions and home video

Reported running times differ by source and version: Studio Pierrot lists the feature at 89 minutes, the Oshii archive at 91 minutes, allcinema and Filmarks at 80 minutes, Pia at 110 minutes, and JustWatch at 101 minutes, while Eiga.com notes that an uncut 104-minute version was later released.¹^•⁵^•¹³^•¹⁴^•¹¹^•⁷^•⁸ The 2015 Japanese Blu-ray box edition from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment runs 90 minutes on a single disc.³

In North America, Discotek Media released the film on Blu-ray on December 31, 2021, listing 102 minutes, a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, Japanese and English audio, and English subtitles.¹⁵ As of late 2026 the film streams in the United States on Crunchyroll, RetroCrush, and Cineverse channels, among others, and is free with ads on The CW and AsianCrush.⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026