Tenchi Muyo!

Tenchi Universe • Tenchi Muyo in Love • Tenchi Forever

tenchi muyo! aka No Need for Tenchi. 1992–95. OAV. (13 X 30 min.) Comedy/drama/science fiction. dir Hiroki Hayashi. des Masaki Kajishima.

tenchi universe 1995–96. TV series. (26 x 30 min.) dir Hiroshi Negishi.

tenchi muyo in love 1996. Movie. 95 min. Comedy/drama/science fiction. dir Hiroshi Negishi.

tenchi forever 1999. Movie. 94 min. dir Hiroshi Negishi. -bc

Tenchi, a contemporary high school boy in a Japanese mountain town, suddenly finds himself surrounded by adoring women from other parts of the galaxy. At its best, this “harem” series offers a funny, touching, and endearing mix of comedy, romance, sci-fi, and traditional Japanese culture.

Through an extraordinary set of circumstances, high school boy Tenchi Masaki finds himself at the center of a growing circle of attractive young women of extraterrestrial origin, starting with lusty space pirate Ryoko, whom he unwittingly releases from imprisonment in an ancient family shrine. They are joined in rapid succession by the very proper Ayeka and her sister, the bubbly little Sasami, royal princesses of the planet Jurai; Mihoshi, a ditzy blond who is sent by the Galaxy Police to capture Ryoko; and Washu, a cute, diminutive twenty-thousand-year-old redhead who happens to be the universe’s reigning scientific genius. And then there’s Ryo-Ohki, a cuddly furry animal (a cat/rabbit or “cabbit”) that can transform into Ryoko’s spaceship. Ayeka and Ryoko soon get into pitched battles for the affections of Tenchi, who’s constantly puzzled by all this attention.

The OAV series introduces these characters one by one and then shows them settled into an easy domesticity with Tenchi, his father Nobuyuki, and his maternal grandfather, Yosho, who is the actual heir to the throne of Jurai, but has forsaken his past for his life on earth. (Tenchi’s mother had died when he was a little boy.)

The TV series, Tenchi Universe, starts out as a remake of the OAV series with slight alterations and the addition of Galaxy Police officer Kiyone, a no-nonsense brunette assigned as partner to the hapless Mihoshi. However, in the series’ second half, the entire crew goes out into space for an epic journey across the galaxy to the planet Jurai, where a military coup has installed a pretender to the throne. Only when Tenchi’s maternal grandfather reveals the secret of his lineage can a plan be hatched to restore the throne to its rightful heirs.

Tenchi Muyo in Love involves an intergalactic villain, Kain, who escapes the custody of the Galaxy Police and heads back in time to target Tenchi’s mother to get revenge on the house of Jurai for its role in his capture. Tenchi and his entourage rally to stop Kain, even though it means a trip twenty-six years back in time to when Tenchi’s parents, Achika and Nobu­yuki, were high school students. Tenchi and his entourage, guided by Washu in her computerized control room, endeavor to keep an eye on Achika until such time as Kain makes his move. When they get word that the attack will occur during the school trip to Tokyo Tower, the team prepares for battle.

Tenchi Forever finds Tenchi lured into a parallel dimension by Haruna, a woman who was once the lover of his grandfather and whose spirit occupies a camellia tree on the family property. Under an amnesiac spell, Tenchi has set up housekeeping with Haruna in a town that coexists and sometimes overlaps with a real town, where Washu has detected his presence. Determined to find him, Ryoko and Ayeka move there and get jobs in a diner to pay for their stay. When Washu comes up with a method of merging the two worlds, Ryoko and Ayeka face their toughest challenge yet to winning Tenchi’s heart.

Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki (1992–2005, OAV, 20 eps.)

Tenchi Muyo! Mihoshi Special (1994, OAV)

Tenchi Universe (1995, TV, 26 eps.)

Tenchi Muyo in Love (1996, movie)

Tenchi in Tokyo (1997, TV, 26 eps.)

Tenchi Muyo 2: Daughter of Darkness (1997, movie)

Tenchi Forever (1999, movie)

Tenchi Muyo! GXP (2002, TV, 26 eps.)

Magical Girl Pretty Sammy (1995–97, OAV, 3 eps.)

Magical Project S (1996–97, TV, 26 eps.)

Sasami: Magical Girl Club (2006, TV, 13 eps.)

Sasami: Magical Girl Club Season 2 (2006–7, TV, 13 eps.)

The original Tenchi Muyo! OAVs consisted of two sets of six plus a single episode, all of which were combined to create a series of thirteen episodes which ran on the Cartoon Network in the U.S. in 2000. A spin-off OAV, usually referred to as Mihoshi Special, introduced Kiyone, Mihoshi’s partner in the Galaxy Police, and Magical Girl Pretty Sammy, Sasami’s Sailor Moon–style alter ego, both of whom turned up in the TV series Tenchi Universe, which ran in 1995.

The character designs in the OAV and TV series are fairly exaggerated, as befits the farcical comic tone that often overtakes the proceedings. The girls all have distinct hairstyles and colors, from Ryoko’s tufts of greenish silver hair and Washu’s outcropping of red hair to Mihoshi’s mass of blond curls and Sasami’s blue pigtails. Tenchi himself has an impossibly round and innocent face, ideal for all his wide-eyed and puzzled reactions to the constant madcap goings-on. Ryo-Ohki’s spaceship form follows an organic model, looking more like a tree with fur than the standard streamlined metallic shapes that anime characters normally use to sail the sea of stars. But then, in what other anime series does a soaring spaceship emit a loud “meow”?

The background paintings are particularly beautiful in the scenes set amidst the lush mountain foliage of Grandpa Yosho’s hometown, where most of the Earthside action is set. The house where they all live was designed, in the show, by Tenchi’s architect father and is quite an impressive piece of interior and exterior architectural design.

Tenchi Muyo in Love follows the character design model of the series but is much more fluidly ani­mated and set against a succession of stunning backdrops of detailed landscapes showing Tenchi’s hometown as seen twenty-six years earlier and his parents’ class trip to Tokyo, including an extended climax on the landmark Tokyo Tower.

Tenchi Forever has an entirely different tone from the other pieces of the Tenchi universe. Serious drama rather than farce or sci-fi adventure, it tones down the exaggeration of the characters and makes them calmer and more realistic than we’ve ever seen them. It also presents detailed and realistic settings throughout, particularly in the scenes in the town where Tenchi lives with Haruna and where Ryoko and Ayeka set up house to try and locate him.

The Tenchi Muyo! series is built around the clever and comical notion of a group of powerful intergalactic warrior females stranded on Earth in Japan, sitting around a living room watching TV soaps or a dinner table gulping down noodles. It’s a takeoff on Urusei Yatsura, but with a more mature, detached male at the center of the “harem” than the excitable, lust-driven Ataru. The resultant humor is, of course, much more subtle. The first TM! OAV series introduces the main characters in a set of charming episodes making up the first half of the series and then sits around trying to figure out what to do with them in the second half. But those first six episodes create enough interest in these characters to sustain a dizzying array of subsequent movies, OAV episodes, and TV series, not to mention a host of similar “harem”-themed anime series (e.g., Love Hina).

Tenchi Universe essentially starts off with the same story and setup as the OAV episodes, but makes a few key changes, including the addition to the cast of Kiyone. The TV series length allows the story to build the kind of epic narrative missing from the OAV and maintain a suspenseful pitch right up to the powerful concluding episode. Even so, there are plenty of amusing side trips along the way, including one in which the girls all compete in a beauty contest, and another where Kiyone and Mihoshi struggle to hold down day jobs to pay the bills on Earth.

The movies are self-contained stories that are aided by some familiarity with the main characters, but are such spectacular animated works in their own right that they can be enjoyed and appreciated as stand-alone classics. Tenchi Muyo in Love is not only a strong science fiction adventure with an incredibly suspenseful final act, but also a poignant love story that gives the viewers (and Tenchi) their only extended look at Tenchi’s mother, who died when Tenchi was a boy. Some of the plot elements here recall the first Back to the Future movie (1985), in which the lead character also witnessed his parents’ high school courtship, but the issue is handled so differently here (and so sensitively) that it doesn’t really invite comparison. The subtle and delicate treatment of the courtship of Achika and young Nobuyuki, and Tenchi’s observation of it, lends enough beauty and grace to these scenes that there is no need to pour on the sentiment.

Tenchi Forever is also a moving love story, but one which excludes the comic and sci-fi action elements, other than the notion of a parallel world into which Tenchi disappears. It’s also more mature, given the erotic intimacy that Tenchi and Haruna experience, to a degree that has no counterpart in the rest of the series. (No wonder Ryoko’s so furious!) It’s a false intimacy, of course, especially after Tenchi dreams of the other girls and starts questioning how he’d even met Haruna. It’s refreshing to see Ryoko and Ayeka make a team effort to find Tenchi and they show extraordinary devotion and understanding, particularly in an emotional scene where Ryoko gets discouraged and Ayeka talks her through it. It’s a beautiful movie and a welcome change of pace from the frantic tone of the rest of the series, but one which disconcerted fans who wanted their devious old Ryoko back.

Hiroki Hayashi directed the Tenchi Muyo! OAV series and also directed Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 and Sol Bianca, and provided the original concept for the El Hazard OAV series. Hiroshi Negishi directed Tenchi Universe and the movies Tenchi Muyo in Love, which he cowrote, and Tenchi Forever. He also directed Suikoden Demon Century, Burn Up W, and Shadow Skill.

Early on in Tenchi Muyo in Love, Tenchi screens a Super 8 home movie taken by Nobuyuki of Achika in their high school years. Later, during the trip back in time, we witness the moment when Nobuyuki takes the film. At the very end of the film, in a heartbreaking montage, we see scenes of the two during early married life and scenes of baby Tenchi.

The twenty episodes of the Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki series were distributed over three six-episode OAV series and two special episodes, with a gap of almost a decade between the second and third OAV series. The Cartoon Network broadcast in 2000 only included the 13 episodes that had then been released.

A half-hour OAV released in 1995, Galaxy Police Mihoshi’s Space Adventure, usually referred to simply as Mihoshi Special, first introduced Kiyone and the character of Magical Girl Pretty Sammy, a Sailor Moon–type transformation for Sasami. Kiyone would become a member of the cast in the fifth episode of Tenchi Universe, while Pretty Sammy would make a cameo appearance. Pretty Sammy would get her own OAV specials in 1996, followed by her own TV series. The Pretty Sammy OAV specials follow their own continuity and put the characters in a completely different situation, with no hint of extraterrestrial origins. Here Sasami is Tenchi’s sister and they live in Tokyo with their mother, a karaoke-crazed owner of a record store (where Kiyone and Mihoshi are the clerks) who is a far cry from the demure and graceful Achika.

Both the movies followed the continuity of Tenchi Universe. A follow-up series, Tenchi in Tokyo, seems to follow TU by opening with all of the characters back in place at Tenchi’s home but then goes off on its own continuity, with minor differences in the backstory. A lower budget and a more cartoonish look made it a somewhat less interesting variation on a theme than other parts of the Tenchi saga.

Another movie, Tenchi the Movie 2: Daughter of Darkness, is very different in tone and style from the other two movies and is only an hour long, making it play more like an OAV spin-off than an actual movie. In it, a demoness named Yuzuha, who’d loved Yosho as a girl back on the planet Jurai and still nurses a grudge over the way she was treated, sends a girl, Mayuka, to Earth to masquerade as Tenchi’s daughter from the future, using her to disrupt life in Tenchi’s household. It has some bizarre plot elements, and its questionable treatment of Mayuka’s affection for Tenchi is sure to raise some eyebrows.

violence In Tenchi Muyo in Love, there is one brief bit of gore during the climactic battle involving the killing of an officer from the Galaxy Police. nudity There is female nudity in the OAV series and some of the TV episodes, invariably involving the girls in their beloved hot spring bath. This nudity was covered up with digitally applied bathing suits when the series aired on the Cartoon Network in the U.S. In Tenchi Forever, there are intimate embraces in bed between Tenchi and Haruna, who is seen nude.