SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

It is evening and Shinobu wakes at her desk and pulling out a book, finds a letter Kitsune had left her. Meanwhile, the little fox “Kitsune” observes the summer festival before going to animal school and learning to draw what he likes, which is Shinobu. The cat teacher says that if they don’t, he’ll destroy whatever it is they like. This worries Kitsune a great deal, so after class, he races through the night to see the scarecrow Sanshiro to get directions to the bus. After a few failed attempts, Sanshiro finally gets Kitsune on the bus.  Kitsune tells the cat driver that his destination is Tomobiki.  The bus takes off and as morning dawns, the bus is literally flying to its destination as Kitsune is awed by what he sees.  The bus finally drops Kitsune off in an ally and he takes off for Shinobu’s house.

At Tomobiki High School, Onsen-sensei is about to punish the whole class since the boys didn’t do their homework, something the girls find intolerable. Meanwhile, Kitsune arrives at Shinobu’s house as Cherry is fleeing, having stolen a fish. At his camp, Cherry hears the details and Kotatsu-neko agrees to help. Arriving at class, Kotatsu-neko has to battle “Hokuto-kun” before Kitsune, in a pseudo principle disguise, tells Shinobu she’s in danger. The class decides to go along and Onsen-sensei can’t stop it although he grips Ataru the entire time. They walk to the back ally and get on the flying bus to Kitsune’s neighborhood. In the clearing where Kitsune goes to class, the teacher has already forgotten the assignment, meaning Shinobu is safe. As such, everyone attends the final evening of the festival and has fun.

Thoughts/Review:

NOOOOO!  Kitsune episodes are so dreadful to me.  *_*  This one was no exception as there was just an insane amount of time killing that had to be done for such a terrible story.  The whole first-half of the episode was dreadful and slow.  In the second half, as much time as could be wasted was wasted just so that there would be enough materials to fill a thirty minute episode. Kinda like what I’m doing with this paragraph. Notice how I’m just writing and writing but saying nothing as I fill time to get a paragraph written so that it looks like I have something to say when in fact I had nothing to say.  However, I won’t stop because you see, I have a full paragraph to fill with an image, just like the anime had a full episode to fill, with whatever.  Fortunately, there were some things to interest me.

There were two cameos I noticed.  The first was an extended cameo of Kenshiro from Hokuto no Ken, better known in the U.S. as Fist of the North Star. In this anime, he was called “Hokuto-kun” rather then Kenshiro. Since Kenshiro’s seiyuu, KAMIYA Akira, also does the voice for Shuutaro in the series, it is not surprising that he would do both voices.  I’ve only seen one episode of Fist of the North Star but the iconic image of Kenshiro and his fighting style are known to me, thus when he appeared in the classroom, I was amused.  I actually laughed when “Hokuto-kun” and Kotatsu-neko broke out into a fight with “Hokuto-kun” actually losing.  So I give the production team one there.

Many of the chase sequences are the funniest parts of Urusei Yatsura. Cherry stealing the fish and then making a fast get away, much of which was shown from a first person perspective, was marginally funny.  Things flew by at a rapid and insane manner but I did immediately spot Lupin and Jigen from Lupin III on the freeway.  Too bad their car wasn’t the trademark yellow but it was close enough.  ^_^  I’m sure that there were other cameos because there was a guy with some sort of energy attack and a mobile suit, which looked like it could have come from Starship Troopers.

I think what I’ve described in the last two paragraphs are about a combined total of maybe five minutes of the episode, max.  That shows you how much “meh” the rest of the episode was.