n a bright spring morning at the Masaki family shrine, space pirate
Ryoko and Jurai Princess Ayeka are engaged in their continual competitive
squabbling over nothing. As usual, Tenchi intervenes, and they promptly
batten onto him and demand he choose between them. Obviously a definitive
choice would put a serious crimp in the love triangle that's carried Tenchi
through multiple movies, TV series, original video releases and manga books, so Tenchi avoids
the question and runs away into the woods. And doesn't come out again.
Six months later, Ryoko, Ayeka, and the rest of the alien aggregates who
make Tenchi's life interesting are still looking for him. The search has
become despondent rather than frantic; Ryoko and Ayeka have given
up fighting and are morosely living and working together in an effort to
maintain themselves in Tokyo, where Washu insists Tenchi can be found. From
time to time the girls catch glimpses of him, looking older and more
sophisticated, in the company of a beautiful young woman. But when they
attempt to confront him, he always disappears without a trace.
Finally Ryoko and Ayeka manage to step into a strange, silent world
where they find Tenchi and his mystery companion, Haruna. But Tenchi doesn't see
them, and they can't touch him. The woman orders them to leave Tenchi to
her, and she disappears with him. Washu concludes that Tenchi's captor has
taken him to a parallel world, but that he isn't fully anchored to it and
keeps slipping briefly back into his home dimension. She proposes a plan to
tie the two worlds together with Jurai energy so Tenchi can be rescued. But
Tenchi is clearly in love with Haruna, and his denial of his past
life is even more potent than Haruna's strange magic.
Something old, new, borrowed, beautiful
This stand-alone movie is an oddly sedate but moving addition to the
Tenchi Muyo! continuum--a melancholy fairy tale out of a Childe
ballad, with Tenchi in the Tam Lin role. Most of the Tenchi crowd--Sasami, Kiyone, Mihoshi and the rest--are barely present, appearing only long enough to bow to their fans and clear the stage for the
central drama. The usual comedic histrionics are almost entirely absent as
well. This is a slow, serious, sensual film, its tone set by
intermittent scenes of falling flower petals and soaring music, heavy on
the harp and piano. Tsuneyoshi Sato's intensely emotional score doesn't
just set the mood, it enforces it.
Tenchi purists may argue that they barely even recognize their
favorite characters in this story--Tenchi is a handsome, self-contained
artist rather than a put-upon pawn; Ayeka is Ryoko's emotional support
rather than her enemy; Sasami is a grave priestess rather than a bubbly
child; and Ryoko doesn't even blow anything up. It's as if screenwriter
Masaharu Ayano allowed everybody to actually mature as they might have in
the years since Tenchi began--as if they were not living
in a sitcom world that resets at the end of each episode. In some ways, the
result is unsatisfying. It's as if this isn't a Tenchi story at
all, and the script uses the Tenchi backbone only to avoid having to
develop the characters or establish their relationships. Much of the depth
simply comes from understanding the monumental significance of the
characters' changed behaviors, given their pasts.
But at the same time, this imaginative stretch is a relief compared to
the franchise's endless repetition of circular bickering. Haruna--part Queen
of Elfland, part vengeful spirit and part lonely dryad--is a poignant
axis for a love story that goes nowhere and needs to go nowhere. To the
Tenchi cast, this is just another momentary interruption in the long
ebb and flow of a popular series, but to longtime fans, it can be a sweet
flight of fancy that adds a few interesting shadows to a world of cartoon
pastels.
Ninety-five minutes of Tenchi and only about three seconds of
Ryo-Ohki...it doesn't get much better than that. Kudos, by the way, to
Ayano for not ending this with a big, unnecessary comedic "we now return
you to your regular story" sequence.
-- Tasha
y the end of the last installment of Tenchi in Tokyo,
the powerful, mysterious Yugi was tormenting the extended Masaki "family,"
weaving a procession of plots to distance Tenchi Masaki from his various
space suitors. The rest of the series deals with the
increasing success of her efforts as she manipulates Tenchi's human
friends and family to facilitate his relationship with a Tokyo schoolgirl,
while alienating his fractious admirers with appeals to their vanity,
emotions and dreams.
Yugi's methods range from direct attacks to subtle maneuverings to
bizarre exercises of comic power. In one particularly weird episode, she
has a servant create a clone of Tenchi's father, intended to encourage
Tenchi to declare his love for his would-be girlfriend Sakuya. The clone,
which proves to be seriously flawed and dumb as a rock, runs amok screaming
"Love, love, love!" and grabbing girls at random. In another episode, Yugi's
attempts to send Ayeka to Tokyo to cause more interfamily friction are
forestalled by an interesting but irrelevant unrequited relationship
between a female biker and her speed-happy beloved. In a third, Ryo-Ohki is
lured to the moon, then retrieved, all with little apparent effort or
effect.
In fact, many of the mid-series episodes seem like empty time-killers,
designed to drag out the action through a full TV season. But Yugi's plots
do eventually prove effective, as Ryoko bitterly returns to her wild life
as a space pirate, detectives Mihoshi and Kiyone finally get their
long-awaited promotion and leave Earth, and Tenchi shuts them all out to
pursue a kinder, gentler relationship with a girl who doesn't disintegrate
things when she's annoyed. All of which leaves Yugi in a perfect position
to carry out her plans to conquer Earth and redesign it in her own
image.
It gets there...eventually
Each new Tenchi series offers a slightly different version of the Tenchi protagonists--sometimes sillier, sometimes more serious. Tenchi in
Tokyo's main flaw is that it reinterprets the cast a tad too
sadistically. For instance, low-key scenes between Tenchi and his father
Nobuyuki encourage viewers to respect Nobuyuki as a gentle, if bumbling,
man who wants what's best for his son; this makes it hard to see the humor
in his ongoing humiliation at the hands of Ayeka and company, who enslave
him, tie him up, beat him, interrogate him under threat of torture, steal
his life savings, and eventually seal him out of his own house.
Ayeka in particular acts unnecessarily clutchy and brainless throughout
this series. Once the epitome of bruised but enduring royal dignity, she's
devolved into a shrewish whiner, considerably less mature than her younger
sister Sasami. Even her prissy accent in the dubbed editions of these
tapes seems off-kilter--one of the few annoyances in what's otherwise an
admirably professional cast, capable of giving their alter egos character
without slavishly imitating the original Japanese voices.
But where Ayeka is diminished, Ryoko and Tenchi both grow throughout this series. While Ryoko is not entirely happy as a space pirate,
she's much more involving when exploring her limits than when moping after
Tenchi--who himself is more interesting on his own than when his
character is crushed under the weight of everyone's emotional demands.
Throughout Tenchi in Tokyo, Yugi's plans are sometimes confusing,
sometimes brilliant, sometimes exciting and sometimes plain pointless, but
they consistently serve the purpose of highlighting the nature of the
troubled relationships between these longstanding characters. And in the
end, Grandfather Masaki's quiet revelation about Tenchi's true nature draws
the entire series together in a payoff that's well worth all the effort to
date.
Yugi herself proves pretty interesting for a
cartoony villain. Too bad the sitcom nature of the series keeps her from
becoming a recurring character.
-- Tasha
n a bright spring morning at the Masaki family shrine, space pirate
Ryoko and Jurai Princess Ayeka are engaged in their continual competitive
squabbling over nothing. As usual, Tenchi intervenes, and they promptly
batten onto him and demand he choose between them. Obviously a definitive
choice would put a serious crimp in the love triangle that's carried Tenchi
through multiple movies, TV series, original video releases and manga books, so Tenchi avoids
the question and runs away into the woods. And doesn't come out again.
y the end of the 
