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| THIS IS AN ANIME ONLY DISCUSSION POST. DO NOT DISCUSS THE MANGA BEYOND THIS EPISODE. ---------------------------------------- Found this really hard to finish. I confess to not really paying much attention as it went on, but was there any logic behind what was happening (after the initial set-up of the "plot")? I mean, obviously it's all pretty random anyway, but I don't know. Cut to fighting. I expected a laugh at least. 2 & 3 were surreal and great with it... *I don't think I've ever "hated" before! Even with some really crap stuff. |
BlackoutingJan 18, 2014 4:39 PM
| Hey I'm a lover of the life of the mind and longtime fan of pretentious twaddle but simply thought this was a bad film ! To each their own though. I've never watched the series so guess this wasn't made for me. |
| Incoherent! I didn't like the second movie as much as many people seem to because I thought it was too much a collection of neat imagery that didn't add up to much, but that problem is taken to extremes here. A lot of stuff that happens is rather dreary, to boot. There is nothing interesting about Mendou's dream sequence and it lasts ten minutes. The best thing about this movie was Ten's adorable tiger suit which was on screen for all of a minute. GOASOS said: This is a movie that requires some context, I think. The movie was directed out of frustration at the fans, and at the life of the director having been taken over by the making of the series. http://www.furinkan.com/uy/articles/articles/corrigan.htm Disillusioned artists' resentment at their fans is often a pretty tedious thing, I find. |
| What a strange movie to be honest! Definitely interesting, but so strange... especially the in the story development, together with a weird pacing and rather absurd ending. I really do wonder where this movie fits in the whole franchises picture. Still a nice movie, just so damn strange. |
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| Holy damn, that was boring to watch. |
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| Wow, this movie just wasn't good at all So far this is the lowest point for the entire series for me There were some good bits near the beginning of this film, but overall I really disliked it. |
MetaThPr4h said: Holy damn, that was boring to watch. Big agree. While the credits were rolling on this one, I thought to my self "Well that is an hour and a half of my life wasted." |
| Bad an uninteresting, I knew the stuff about the director being mad about fans but why make the movie this bad? I really tried to pay attention and tie plot lines but couldn't. They shoudl've made something funny and go home. I can't imagine the frustration watching it in the cinema, I bet some fans wanted their money back. |
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| I liked this better than Beautiful Dreamer, but like that film I feel the first half was definitely better than the second. The whole eerie vibe before Lum straight up disappears and they start "Explaining" what's going on is much more powerful for. Especially because so much focuses on Lum herself rather than her relations with the rest of the cast, letting a glimpse into her psyche that Beautiful Dreamer lacked in my opinion. The music is fucking great, totally adding to that sense of almost Lynchian unease for that part of the movie. I still liked the second half better than the ending of Beautiul Dreamer, probably because it focused on wider range of characters than Ataru. I can tell this film isn't held in any way near as high regard as Beautiful Dreamer, but I found it's portrayal of dreamscapes in a more collective and visceral form to be more interesting than that movies. |
| Weird movie. Couldn't tell what the heck was going on for the majority of the time, even after finishing it. My guess is they tried to do another Beautiful Dreamer but failed. But at least after finishing Beautiful Dreamer, you can start seeing the point of the film and understand what it was all about... unlike in Lum the Forever. |
Fronzel said: GOASOS said: This is a movie that requires some context, I think. The movie was directed out of frustration at the fans, and at the life of the director having been taken over by the making of the series. http://www.furinkan.com/uy/articles/articles/corrigan.htm Disillusioned artists' resentment at their fans is often a pretty tedious thing, I find. Too bad the link is unavailable now :( Edit- found an alternative http://www.furinkan.com/features/articles/corrigan.html |
| Well like 90% of the TV episodes, it started fine and then completely fell apart at the end. I was on board until the war started and took up the last 25%. The whole time I was expecting some resolution, like this was part of the movie they were filming, but no. In fact the student film premise had almost nothing to do with anything other than as an excuse to cut the tree down. Which by the way, no one thought it strange the tree had a spinal column and ribs? And who was the skeleton buried underneath it? I don't understand how any of this affects Lum. The premise of her gradually losing her powers seemed to have potential but she just goes and drowns herself for a week and comes back and is completely back to normal again. Like was said by others earlier, one scene to the next just doesn't connect. Going by the montage of pictures during the credits, and the fact it was I believe the second to last episode that said to go watch this movie, I get the impression this was meant as a farewell to the series and fans, like the town is destroyed, it's over, move on to something new, but here are memories/pictures of it to remember some of the good parts. Well that's fine to have a meta commentary like that but the plot of the movie should stand on its own which this does not. Still, it was nice to look at, like the animation and quality was good so I can't hate it, but the final third really sinks the whole project. Still managed to be better than movies 1 and 3 though, despite all that nonsense at the end. |
| The most interesting thing about this movie is that Kakugari got an uncharacteristically large amount of uninterrupted dialogue, that's literally the only thing that I remember all these months after watching it. I don't know why people say movie 6 is the worst, because I'm pretty sure this is a much more valid contender for that title. |
Opinions are opinions, and differing opinions can co-exist. π But I don't do debate, life's too short to spend time debating people.  |
| I don't understand this movie at all. |
| Lum the Forever aka the "black sheep" of Urusei Yatsura. Saw a few people call this movie that. This is a very very strange movie. Which is saying something because this is Urusei Yatsura we're talking about. When I first watched this movie I didn't understand WTF it was about. After a rewatch, I still don't understand WTF it's about. I mostly forgot about the movie a week later and couldn't tell what the plot was and I think I'll do the same thing again. I think the theme was about the disappearance of Lum... again. Remember My Love also did the same thing. But this time, it's much more cryptic. But the main issue of the movie is that it's just not funny. While Movie 3 failed at comedy, this one barely even has any comedy. Even the director Kazuo Yamazaki acknowledged this in his interview. It's strangely serious, which doesn't mix well with Urusei Yatsura. I think the director/scriptwriter got way too carried away. And he did express regret in the interview linked above. This movie had a negative reception when it was first released. It didn't capture the general audience of Urusei Yatsura. Mamoru Oshii was fired(?) for similar reasons because of his movie Beautiful Dreamer. So I don't understand why the hell they allowed this movie to be made and released...? Beautiful Dreamer didn't have much comedy in it either. But the film was at least interesting to watch. There wasn't any dull moment in it. It kept my interest all the way through. Meanwhile, this movie doesn't seem to have any coherent structure. Visually it's impressive for sure. But it just feels like eye candy without any sort of meaning. All of the scenes feel heavily disconnected. If you cut out all of the scenes separately and told me they were from different UY episodes, I'd probably believe you. That's just how jarring this is. If this was just a regular Urusei Yatsura episode without all of the padding to make it to movie length, I'm sure it would've been a great episode. But as a movie, it feels like pseudointellectual nonsense and pretentious for the sake of being pretentious. I think I understand the reason why this movie was made like this. If you look at the timing of the release, you'll see the TV series Urusei Yatsura was nearing its end in 1986. So this movie was like the final big Urusei Yatsura project. Whereas the manga was still ongoing. After rewatching it with more context, I noticed that there are a lot of signs of 'finality' in this movie. At least that must've been what the staff of Studio Deen thought. This very well could've been the last Urusei Yatsura movie (thank goodness it wasn't). Heck, it WAS the final UY movie for Deen. Movie 5 was made by a different studio and the OVAs were made by various studios IIRC. At the end of the movie, Sakura remarks to Shinobu how they don't know where they were heading next. Pretty sure that's how the staff felt regarding Urusei Yatsura. And the credits end with a picture of all the main cast. That's what I meant about the 'finality'. Despite all of this, the main theme song "Melancholy no Kiseki" slaps and there's also a version performed by Lum's seiyuu Fumi Hirano which is just perfect. Daviljoe193 said: I agree. Movie 6 does have its issues but I think most people hate Movie 6 because they watched it after Movie 5. But if you watch it as a standalone movie and not as a sequel to The Final Chapter, it's still pretty entertaining. I can't say the same about Movie 4.The most interesting thing about this movie is that Kakugari got an uncharacteristically large amount of uninterrupted dialogue, that's literally the only thing that I remember all these months after watching it. I don't know why people say movie 6 is the worst, because I'm pretty sure this is a much more valid contender for that title. |
| Well that was the 4th and final movie that came out within the original show’s runtime, and I think I have more issues with this movie than the first 3 movies. That being said tho, I did still really enjoy this movie just like the ones before it, it was visually awesome and brought some great ost once again, it’s just a shame we won’t be hearing this ost be reused in the main show because it only has a handful of episodes left at this point. But with that, let’s get into the meat of this review lol. So starting with the things I loved about this movie, the entire first half really had me reeled in. The plot with the giant sakura tree and Lum losing her powers was very interesting, I was really curious as to what was going on with the weird blackout at the beginning of the movie, and the moment they chopped the tree down it had a super weird death where it left behind what looked like bones, and then all the weird shit started happening afterward with the cicadas and dragonflies going crazy and then the weird weather, and of course you had a lot of spooky imagery happening like when they discovered the skeleton underwater and when those guards witnessed the weird shit happening, definitely kinda fitting for spooky month lol. And as Lum started losing her powers and pretty much became a normal girl, she disappeared and everyone lost their shit. And this is pretty much the end of what I thought was the really good stuff, and Mendou’s dream was the beginning of where I thought the movie started to lose direction. His dream was really cool visually, but ultimately it added absolutely nothing to the movie besides the parts where Lum was being mysterious in it, and it also went on for way too long for how little it actually mattered. Thankfully Shinobu’s dream lasted a much shorter amount of time, and this was apparently just to show their dreams were being frozen in reality, kinda cool but once again, spent way too long on Mendou’s dream just for this to happen. Then.. the war between Mendou and Tobimaro happened. Once again, very cool visually, I love the idea of these two huge families going to war, but… why did this happen lol. They explained it was to destroy the frozen dreams and save Lum, but they didn’t explain why they decided this was a good idea or how it would change anything, I was thinking why don’t they just target the giant mountain that formed or the frozen dreams themselves, why did there have to be a war lol. And then you had Ataru who just ran the whole time, I thought maybe he was running to find Lum but no, he just ran around the whole time lol. And after all that went down, Lum returned to the cast after talking to what I think was the tree itself, and everything went back to the way things were with a great chase to end the movie, I did kinda like this ending but the way we got there just seemed too random and aimless, like they had too many ideas and just threw them all in there without any direction. And sadly, I didn’t really understand the plot with the giant sakura tree, what I gathered was that it connects all of Tomobiki and destroying it made everything go wacko, but it doesn’t really explain the fixation on Lum, but maybe it goes to show how much Lum means to Tomobiki, and when she came back that’s why everyone went back to their goofy selves. Maybe I’m trying to make too much sense of the nonsensical, but this is what I got from it lol. And despite all of my complaints of the 2nd half, I want to reiterate that I did still really enjoy the movie, it was a really fun watch despite the lack of direction near the end, and I do feel this fits right in with the other movies too. And lastly, I gotta comment on the ending credits music, that song was an absolute jam and a super fitting song to end the movie, felt very final for sure, almost like this was meant to be the final movie, especially with the visuals showcasing moments from the previous movies, but thankfully we still got some more that came out after the show ended so I’m definitely looking forward to those when I get to them. This may have taken up time this month that I could have used for horror movies, but I’m glad I watched this and am now ready to finish the original anime, it’s been a fun ride. |
TheColonel76Oct 22, 2023 5:57 AM