English Dub Review: Urusei Yatsura “Big Bottle, Little Bottle / When Love Strikes”

Overview:

Lum is quite the handful, no matter what size she is. Later, a shapeshifting fox takes a liking to Shinobu.

Our Take:

Atartu just had to come back into the show, didn’t he? We were all having a good time without him but nooooo he just had to return to ruin a decent show. He’s back and the show’s quality took an immediate dive.

Lum accidentally gets shrunk to a tiny size and wants to use this opportunity to get Ataru to dote on her. Now I get that she shouldn’t have lied about how to fix her predicament but maybe if Ataru wasn’t such a tool in the first place she wouldn’t feel like she had to. There were a couple of moments where he actually treated her pretty well and took on the cause of showering her with affection. But then he overheard her telling a cat that it wasn’t true and immediately put her in a cage. Instead of asking himself “Hmm, why might she be doing this?” he just goes into asshole mode.

The second half of the episode was a little better since Ataru was hardly in it. There was a cute fox that felt it owed Shinobu a debt and tried to be around her as much as possible. It was a cute little distraction other than when Ataru showed up. Luckily, there is only one episode left in this one, I can’t wait to be done.