Uchuujin MuuMuu is a pretty obscure title for the overseas market. I’m not sure it’s even streaming anywhere in English, but it’s cats and seinen and sci-fi, and not about high schoolers so I figured it was worth a shot. A low-budget venture from OLM for sure, but I found the first episode to have a fair bit of charm. And I really liked both the OP and ED, which have a good deal of wit to them and sound like something Kuricorder Quartet could have put out.
My initial read on this is that it could have come out in the 80s, and it does sort of play that way. A race of cat aliens has ventured out into space after warfare has wiped out their home planet. In an attempt to stave off the worst the intellectuals and leaders were all taken out, leaving only the idiots behind. One of them is the titular alien MuuMuu (who’s voiced by Kozakura Etsuko, who did the culture-explaining shisaa on Okitsura). There it (I have no idea if it’s supposed to be male or female or if those even exist on their planet) crashes into the Machida (far western Tokyo) apartment of a college student named Sakurako, who hails from the north and suffers from extreme social anxiety.
Again, this is clearly a no-frills production, with minimal animation and mostly obscure seiyuu. But it’s not awful to look at, and actually rather fun. MuuMuu has a habit of taking apart appliances to see how they work (leaving poor Sakurako without a microwave and refrigerator). MuuMuu’s analogy – just because it can pilot a spaceship doesn’t mean it can build one, any more than Sakurako could put her smartphone back together – is actually kind of valid. Sakurako looks up how these things work on the internet and explains them to MuuMuu without really understanding, and eventually something happens to make the concept decipherable. It’s kind of cleverly handled.
I also liked the way Sakurako’s social anxiety was portrayed, and the bit where MuuMuu’s ally deduced that humans were slaves to Earth cats was on-point. We have a budding romance with one of Sakurako’s classmates, Akihito, who hangs out with a super-annoying girl but appears not to like it (he does like cats though). This series worked for me in the ways I thought it might, so it’s worth hanging with for a while to see where it goes.
The post First Impressions – Uchuujin MuuMuu (Me and the Alien MuMu) appeared first on Lost in Anime.
