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Urusei Yatsura

Urusei Yatsura (うる星やつら) is a well-known 1980s manga and anime series. The title is a complicated Japanese pun which roughly translates as "those obnoxious aliens".

This cartoon spanned six films, 218 TV episodes, and ten OVAs. It was created by Rumiko Takahashi in 1981. It concerns the adventures of a group of teenagers on a slightly fantastical and often ridiculously surreal version of Earth.

The series is very light-hearted in nature and often quite bizarre.

Warning: Wikipedia contains spoilers

The Story

The story concerns an extremely lecherous and very unlucky high-school boy, Ataru Moroboshi, and bikini clad alien princess Lum. Lum is in love with Ataru because he accidental proposed to her, even though he chases after every humanoid female other than Lum. (It's not that she's ugly, it's just that he lost interest in her as soon as she started chasing him) The series is mainly episodic, with only occasional plots spanning more than one chapter/episode. Each chapter/episode usually concerns Ataru's ill-luck, his lechery (and Lum's jealousy thereof), or the wide variety of weird humans and aliens who love, hate, or simply meddle with Lum and Ataru.

Only You

The first movie was entitled Only You. The main characters are:

The basic plot of the first film is that the five-year-old Ataru steps on Elle's shadow during an impromptu game of shadow-tag; in Elle's culture, this is viewed as a marriage proposal. Twelve years later, Elle returns to Earth in order to marry Ataru - by which time not only had he forgotten the events of his childhood, but he was also going out with Lum. The rest of the plot focuses on Lum's attempts to prevent the marriage.