This 1984 film, the second movie based on the popular URUSEI YATSURA TV series, in turn based on the popular manga series of the same name
by Rumiko Takahashi, is probably the best reality-questioning feature film ever
made starring wacky high school students and their jealous space alien
girlfriends. Directed by Mamoru (GHOST IN THE SHELL, PATLABOR THE MOVIE, AVALON) Oshii, BEAUTIFUL DREAMER is a brain-bending think
piece far removed from typical Urusei Yatsura hijinks.
We all know about Tomobiki
High School; full of colorful
students and staff, home to weekly happenings of cosmic craziness. Notorious lecher and bad-luck magnet Ataru
Moroboshi is the 11th grade class-clown embarrassment, but his lowly
status is overlooked by his girlfriend, the green-haired outer space princess
known as Lum. As our film opens, the
student body is running itself ragged preparing for the school festival; an annual
fete of crazy Toho monster-movie costumes, floats, parades, and assorted school
spirit exercises. Most students are
half-dead from exhaustion and overwork and the seemingly endless preparation,
and it seems if the work will never end.
But their teacher, the fiery Mr. Onsen-Mark, has another
idea – that they actually ARE reliving the
same days over and over. They’re stuck in an endless cycle of early mornings
and late nights and colorful bunting and papier-mache. Onsen’s contention is they’re trapped in the
famous fairy tale of Urashima Taro, the Japanese Rip Van Winkle who rode a
turtle down to the undersea kingdom, hung out for a little while, and found when
he returned to the surface a hundred years had passed. When the students make an effort to leave
the school, they find that all the trains take them back to Tomobiki Station
and all the cabs and buses do is drive in circles, and the morning reveals yet
another deja-vu day of festival preparation.
It seems obnoxious rich kid Shutaro Mendo’s secret emergency Harrier
VTOL Jet provides the only escape – and yet once in the air, the appalling
secret of Tomobiki’s isolation becomes clear.
Cut off from the Earth, nourished by a mysteriously
replenishing mini-mart, crowded into the family home of Ataru’s long-suffering
parents; this potential LORD OF THE FLIES becomes an idyllic paradise of relaxation
amidst the ruins of their former home town. But the true nature of their
situation soon becomes clear. Since this
is a 18 year old dub of a twenty-eight year old film that is, after all, called
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by revealing that yes,
this is all a dream – the dream of someone for whom the busy, bustling days of
the school carnival are the happiest of all.
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER is a curiosity; its theme is one that will
be revisited by Hollywood in films
as disparate as GROUNDHOG DAY and THE MATRIX
(not to mention DARK CITY). Oshii was no stranger to URUSEI YATSURA; he
directed scores of TV episodes and was called in to finish the first U.Y. film
ONLY YOU; and he was familiar enough with the characters to use them as a
vehicle to ask his own questions. BEAUTIFUL
DREAMER really captures a sense of disconnection where even something as
commonplace as your own street can seem to be completely alien. This is the point where this wacky high
school SF comedy meets Philip K. Dick reaching for the light cord that isn’t there in his classic TIME OUT OF JOINT; the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and
then you begin to question if ANYTHING is what it seems.
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER is atypical, even for an
anything-can-happen series like URUSEI YATSURA. It’s an ambitious film that
asks questions and goes places that UY doesn’t normally go, and while I’m all
for stretching boundaries and pushing envelopes, at the end of the day this is
an Lum movie without any musical segments, with precious little Ataru comedy
moments, and where some of the funniest characters are relegated to the
background while the majority of the exposition is left to the un-funny,
responsible types like Sakura. U.Y. purists may be advised to stick with ONLY
YOU.
On the other hand, it’s easy to see where Oshii and his
staff would be hungry to work on a different kind of URUSEI YATSURA story. After more than a hundred TV episodes and a
feature film that to Oshii felt like an extended version of same, the urge to
stretch creative muscles must have been overwhelming. Ultimately I think this kind of
reality-bending storyline is held back by the URUSEI YATSURA framework; U.Y. is
a show where anything and everything can happen and usually does, and when
we’re confronted on a regular basis with aliens, storybook characters come to
life, robots, military hardware, mythological deities and ghosts, we can hardly
be expected to give BEAUTIFUL DREAMER the awe-struck reception such a storyline
asks for. It’s a gutsy move, using an
established franchise like this; the deconstructive, “what does it all mean”
plot device wasn’t the cliché in 1984 that it would be twenty years later.
Not as stylish or as deliberative as Oshii’s later works,
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER clocks in at a lean 100 minutes. Remarkably, for a film where really not that
much happens, it doesn’t seem to drag.
The animation is up to Kitty Films/Studio Pierrot’s high standards, and
there are several scenes where things really sparkle. You can particularly see that Oshii’s crew
really enjoyed the Harrier scenes.
Mamoru Oshii’s love of Nazi memorabilia is a curious design choice; in America
swastikas are limited to the covers of 1950s mens adventure magazines and
paperback thrillers about former SS officers plotting to conquer Argentina,
but Oshii sees nothing strange in the students of Tomobiki
High School choosing Nazi Germany
as a theme for their entry in the school festival. This kind of creative
thinking is why Oshii is a top film director.
Or maybe Oshii is a top film director IN SPITE OF this kind of thinking.
It’s hard to tell. The crew was clearly
at home in Tomobiki High; you don’t have to be a subtextural genius to figure
out that the endless sweatshop environment of the school carnival was a
reflection of endless days and nights working on URUSEI YATSURA itself.
The DVD’s commentary
track features an absolutely revelatory Oshii detailing the influence of
real-life events upon the script for BEAUTIFUL DREAMER, his experiences on the
TV animation treadmill, and his feelings towards ONLY YOU. The commentary track – Japanese audio with
English subtitles - isn’t necessary to enjoy the film, but it certainly adds
another dimension to the movie.
The dubbed version of this film was produced in 1996, and
sounds like it. While most of the
casting is professional and talented, none of the English talent comes close to
matching the spirit or the tone of the original. T. Roy Barnes is a good actor and has a great
voice for cartoon work; unfortunately he just doesn’t sound like
Onsen-Mark. The school nurse Sakura gets
the lion’s share of the dialog in the film, and Melanie Head’s line readings
are stiff and repetitive, flattening lines that should be bringing the more
fantastic elements to life. Overall the
dub is representative of most dubs of the 90s – competent but flat, with little
of the thought and professionalism of today’s dubs or the shameless rewriting
and overacting of the 60s and 70s. Nitpicks: Mendo is referred to throughout as
“Shootaroo Mendow”, and while Lum’s brother Ten is admittedly at the age where
gender doesn’t matter so much, it’s still glaring to see him referred to as a
“her”. The original Japanese voices are
some of the best ever assembled; I’d stick with them.
Central Park’s DVD
release is a good package, however; we get the original Japanese trailer and
trailers for the AnimEigo release of URUSEI YATSURA ONLY YOU as well as BEAUTIFUL DREAMER. There’s also an art gallery of film stills and
the fascinating Oshii commentary, moderated in part by Mr. CPM himself John
O’Donnell. Not to mention the fine
transfer of the original film, itself a masterful example of the high
point of the hand-drawn age of Japanese animation.
A departure from the URUSEI YATSURA formula,
BEAUTIFUL DREAMER is both beautiful and dreamlike. It marks the boundary between
straightforward, un-ironic storytelling and the more introspective,
self-referential series that would follow. As an URUSEI YATSURA film it may not
follow the rules, but then again, this is UY, what rules? If you miss your
old-fashioned wacky URUSEI YATSURA there’s always ONLY YOU or the TV show,
produced in a world where Oshii and his staff work long days and endless
nights, wondering if somehow they hadn’t done all this somewhere before.
-Dave Merrill
A previous version of this review was originally published at Anime Jump.
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