Lum the Forever

Kazuo Yamazaki, 1986

Lum the Forever is a lot of things, an internally reflexive thematic conclusion to a franchise. Like the more iconic Beautiful Dreamer (in popular memory -- LtF is much more preoccupied with its inherited pop cultural iconography) an anxiety of Urusei Yatsura’s perpetual existence as a meme and a franchise in which its cast may never grow or change from experience is interrogated, but in Yamazaki’s film the philosophical scope is narrowed to fears of sickness, ageing and death. Lum is losing her abilities, and at the same time she is becoming aware of a world larger, more wonderful complex frightening than the unifactor of the episodic comedy scenario (“I didn’t know there were so many sounds.”) She is growing and in growth she becomes weaker, in growth she is pushed outside of visibility in her community which is not growing. Life is vast and in life strength fails her.

Lum regains her strength in introspection. She becomes a writer, she becomes an observer. She lives out a new childhood constructed out of the present moment. She reawakens to a world that has shattered and cracked in her absence, never the same, back to normal.