ANIME!
The Project A-ko Blu-Ray has a pretty cool story behind it. When Discotek first announced the Blu-Ray, the original film elements were thought to no longer exist, so the plan was to use a Domesday Duplicator to scan the film directly from a laserdisc then use AI upscaling technology on that to create a new 2K master. It was disappointing, but it was the best possible solution at the time. Then Robert Woodhead launched a Kickstarter to remaster the MADOX-01 OVA, and when he contacted the film lab in Tokyo that was storing the film prints for MADOX, he found out they also had Project A-ko stored in the same location. He let Discotek know and they scrapped the plans to use Domesday, and restored the 35mm print instead. And it looks fantastic, btw.
1st and 3rd UY movies came out on Blu-Ray recently. (The 2nd one came out several years ago.) I'm not really a big UY fan, but started watching the movies because of Mamoru Oshii. Even though he only directed the first two, some of the later sequels are interesting too. The first one "Only You" is honestly pretty dull, though. It takes Lum and Ataru's one note relationship and stretches it as far as it can possibly go. Lum loves Ataru, Ataru loves chasing every girl but Lum. This movie adds the alien princess Elle, who Ataru accidentally promised to marry 11 years ago, but then forgot about. So yes, now there are two alien princesses that want to marry Ataru, and Ataru is all to happy to ditch Lum and rush off to an alien planet and marry another alien princess, sight unseen, rather than marry the alien princess he has at home. It's the "mystery box could be anything, it could even be a boat" gag, stretched out to a feature length film.
"Beautiful Dreamer" is by far the best of the series, and one of the best anime films ever made IMO. Oshii wrote this one and had full creative control on it (which almost caused mangaka Rumiko Takahashi to veto the whole thing); and ironically improved everything by pushing Ataru and Lum to the sidelines, ditching all the other aliens and outer space plotlines, and giving more of the focus to the background characters. As the title "Beautiful Dreamer" implies, it has a definitely dreamlike quality to it (literally, as you find out eventually) with the students at Tomobiki High School trapped in a time loop and repeating their days over and over in an idyllic haze. Unlike the first movie, you can definitely see familiar touches here that you'd later seen in Ghost in the Shell and Patlabor.
After the second movie, Oshii dipped out from the series because he wanted to do more creative work, and he was replaced with Kazuo Yamazaki on the series and movies. "Remember My Love" is not even close to as good as "Beautiful Dreamer", but it is better than the first IMO. Lum and Ataru are back to be the focus, but it does try to develop them somewhat beyond just Ataru being hornt up and Lum being mad at him. In this one, Lum gets (accidentally) cursed by a witch to never be with her beloved, which ends up getting Ataru turned into a pink hippo. He gets depressed because he thinks Lum won't want him anymore now that he's a hippo, but she assures him she still does. He eventually turns back into a human, but then Lum is kidnapped by a space wizard. At first Ataru is happy because he can horndog all he wants, but eventually he realizes he isn't happy without Lum. It's not a very focused film, but it's not bad.
Also, as I've said before, I love an 80's movie with a cheesy theme song that has the name of the movie in it, and by god if "Remember My Love" doesn't have one, and in English no less, by Japanese-American pop singer Stephanie.
