Tenchi Muyo in Love Blu-ray Review
Back to Back to the Future.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, December 14, 2012
Note: This film is currently available only in this set:
Tenchi Muyo!: Movie Collection.
Don't you just hate it when you think of a snappy comeback a little too late to make an appropriate impact? Something
like that occurred to me after I watched
Tenchi Muyo in Love, the first of three feature films in the long running
and rather variegated
Tenchi Muyo! franchise. FUNimation is releasing a glut of
Tenchi Muyo! product,
including the original
Tenchi
Muyo!: OVA Series. In that review, I had titled the "deck" (that little subtitle that goes underneath the product
title) "Back to the Future", a reference to the show's kind of quaint nostalgic quality combined with its quasi-futuristic
sci-fi setting. I should have waited to use that "brilliant" description for this first feature film, which I had never seen
before. For
Tenchi Muyo in Love plays very much like a long lost cousin to the
Back to the Future trilogy,
replete with Tenchi caught in a time travel paradox, and a certain kind of interrelationship between "current time"
Tenchi and his mother from a couple of decades previous to the contemporary timeframe of the film that is in fact quite
redolent of the Michael J. Fox enterprise. It can be a little daunting trying to keep track of all the various
Tenchi
Muyo! releases, especially since there hasn't been absolute continuity between various versions of the franchise.
This first feature film has some salient difference from the original set of OVAs and is in fact more directly linked to the
Tenchi Universe television series, which followed the last of the original OVAs and recrafted several characters
and at least tangentially some major plot points. While it's not necessary to really have any grounding whatsoever in
the
Tenchi Muyo! universe (or universes, as the case may be), some reference points will probably help viewers
to understand some basic ideas that populate this feature film. What may surprise some who are only familiar with
Tenchi Muyo! through those original OVAs is how serious, even deadly, this film starts out. The OVAs, while
certainly not shirking from action, had a kind of lunatic quality about them with an often outré sense of humor, and
while certain elements of that remain in this film, it's at least a slightly more somber affair.
For those completely unacquainted with the basic outline of
Tenchi Muyo!'s story, it can best be summed up by
stating that Tenchi is a relatively mild mannered young man who unwittingly frees a captive superpowered female alien
demon named Ryoko who quickly becomes one of several female aliens who surround Tenchi in a pretty standard
harem
anime setup. It turns out that Tenchi himself has a few superpowers of his own, as well as a royal lineage, of which he
had been unaware until he started interacting with Ryoko. This is just the barest tip of a what is a pretty large and
labyrinthine iceberg, but it should suffice to at least make some of what follows a little more understandable.
Tenchi Muyo in Love doesn't seem to have much affection on its mind in the early going, as we get a bristling
action sequence opening the film where mastermind criminal Kain breaks free of his subspace prison (shades of Ryoko
in the original
Tenchi Muyo! OVAs) and wreaks absolute havoc, destroying not just a galactic space station, but
apparently Tenchi's own bloodline by traveling back in time. Tenchi has been showing some sweet home movies of his
parents meeting long ago to Ryoko and his other female cohorts when he literally starts disappearing from view, at
which point Washu (another member of the harem) notices that Tenchi's mother is disappearing from subsequent
frames of the film while Tenchi himself seems on the verge of ceasing to exist. Washu erects a sort of electromagnetic
force field that can temporarily keep Tenchi from disappearing, and the entire group travels back in time to 1970 to try
to keep Kain from exacting revenge on Tenchi's mother which in turn may prevent Tenchi from ever having been born.
While this is ostensibly an at least slightly more serious iteration of the
Tenchi Muyo! story, there's still a lot of
fun to be had, especially as the misfit group surrounding Tenchi attempt to blend into the 1970 school environment
where Tenchi's parents are both students. The funniest of these is undoubtedly Mihoshi, who against all odds tries to
serve as a teacher, finding her inability to even communicate effectively a major drawback.
The film gets a little over convoluted as Tenchi's friends attempt to bring down Kain while at the same time keeping
Tenchi from actually interacting with his young potential parents, as that would create an untenable paradox.
Tenchi Muyo in Love probably takes a little bit too much time in its third act forestalling the inevitable, with Kain
managing not only to escape, but taking Tenchi's mother hostage as well. The time travel aspect is handled reasonably
well here, with a couple of "ping ponging" elements that get us back to "current time", but there's no really over
intellectualized content here that pushes the boundaries of what this particular idiom often offers.
Tenchi Muyo in Love manages to offer the main characters in a somewhat new setting with a high degree of
familiarity for those who have already experienced some iteration of the franchise previously. At the same time, while
there's an undeniable déjà vu quality to the time travel aspect (whether intentionally ironic or not), the film branches
out rather smartly and develops a new level of poignancy that wasn't always present in at least the original OVAs.
