URUSEI YATSURA,MOVIE #6: ALWAYS MY DARLING, (Anime Projects, 77m, subtitled, cert PG, £12.99)
For those not yet familiar with Urusei Yatsura, I'd better explain that this is a vast romantic SF comedy spanning comic books, TV episodes and six movies in which a lecherous youth, Ataru Moroboshi and his friends suffer the visitations of various annoying aliens, mostly cute and female, and especially the delicious LUM, a green-haired alien girl who wears either school uniform or a tiger-skin bikini. Sound interesting yet?
This is a masterpiece of SF comedy, inventive, vividly animated, packed with delightful characters, farcical, but wiser than it might at first seem. In this one Ataru is kidnapped by a space princess who needs him to retrieve a love potion from a temple in the northwestern end of the universe.
It does help to have seen some other U.Y. so you know who everyone is, but heck, don't expect me to write an impartial review of Movie #6; I saw it about four times in Japanese, and now I've got the subtitled tape I'm enjoying it all over again. If I had to choose a handful of anime tapes to take to a desert island, this might well be one of them.