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| From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/ images/I/51ZCHjkRLJL._SY450_.jpg |
Director: Mamoru Oshii
Screenplay: Mamoru Oshii
Based on the manga by Rumiko
Takahashi
Voice Cast: Fumi Hirano as Lum
Invader; Toshio Furukawa as Ataru Moroboshi; Akira Kamiya as Shutaro Mendou;
Kazuko Sugiyama as Ten; Saeko Shimazu as Shinobu Miyake; Machiko Washio as
Sakura; Mayumi Tanaka as Ryuunosuke Fujinami; Shigeru Chiba as Megane; Akira
Murayama as Perm; Shinji Nomura as Kakugari; Issei Futamata as Chibi; Kenichi
Ogata as Ataru's Father; Natsumi Sakuma as Ataru's Mother; Michihiro Ikemizu as
Onsen-Mark; Masahiro Anzai as Ryuunosuke's Father; Tomomichi Nishimura as the
Principal; Ichirō Nagai as Cherry; Takuya Fujioka as Mujaki
Viewed in Japanese with English subtitles
Coming up to their school
festival, the cast of comedy fantasy series Urusei Yatsura, from dumb horny Ataru Moroboshi to space alien
princess Lum, slowly realise the day repeats over and over again. As people
vanish and the world changes, questions arise to how this has come about in
this Mamoru Oshii directed and scripted tale. Now with this premise in mind, to
come to the world of Beautiful Dreamer (as I have) blind to the Urusei Yatsua franchise does add
another detail to this plot that, whilst Beautiful
Dreamer has gained a reputation by itself, you're throw into the deep end
with these characters already existing. That the plot is about something else
asks where the space princess who can fly and shoot lightning comes from
alongside all the other miscreants who are our protagonists.
Some of you are probably blanking
over the fact that, yes, you'd never presume the serious director Mamoru Oshii once animated comedy before
he made films like Ghost in the Shell
(1995).
Let's go back in history then to
explain....legendary manga author Rumiko
Takahashi, who'd create hits like Ranma
½ and Inuyasha thus becoming one
of the most successful and financially well off manga authors of all time,
started Urusei Yatsua in 1978, which
was successful enough to start an animated series in 1981. It was only when Oshii, who started on the first episode,
and the production changed the tone of the series halfway through that it is
said the series gained its own successful reputation, a madcap series which
lasted four seasons, six films (which Beautiful
Dreamer belongs to) and twelve OVA episodes up to 2008. It was a franchise
which played on absurd premises, comedy and mythology, Lum the space princess
in her trademark tiger print bikini explicitly referencing a costume of
Japanese omi (demons) among generally ridiculous jokes.
The premise is that Ataru
Moroboshi, your typical sex obsessed teen male, was chosen as the human being
to protect the Earth from a race of aliens by means of a game of tag between
him and their representative Lum, an event explicitly reinterpreted in a later
segment of Beautiful Dreamer. A
misinterpretation, whilst he won, caused Lum to think he proposed to her as a
wife, thus leading to her living on Earth, electrocuting him with super powers
whenever he pervs on others; the other male students, led by military obsessed Shutaro
Mendou1, were not happy of this situation so, as referenced in the
film, have a group to protect Lum from him or at least try to make his life a
living hell. Neither was Ataru's original human girlfriend Shinobu Miyake impressed
too, a girl with superhuman strength stuck on the side to this farce.
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| From https://i.imgur.com/x3siNcbh.jpg |
Beautiful Dreamer is a film given a huge amount of weight by itself due to Mamoru Oshii's history, a director of a lot of comedy as well as cerebral material even into his early nineties run of live action work, something we don't know a lot about past the Millennium when he fully dived down on sombre writing. The sole screenwriter, lifting from a premise they used in an episode of the series but expanded in scope to full blown surrealism, this is still visible Oshii's work and no one else's. That it's in lieu to a comedy, and a beloved franchise that was already using carte blanche in its premise is the truly unique thing at hand; even without the original context, I was looking at something, even if Beautiful Dreamer was not a high budget work in its time, which went beyond and magnificently into the experimental and creative.
In this world, the introduction
immediately sets up the chaotic slapstick and chaos when the initial premise is
preparing for a school festival, the incredible energy and invention of the
animation team felt fully. The characters are numerous, but you can establish
their personalities with ease from their quirks, particularly as, when the film
occasionally becomes very serious and existential, their simplicity allows them
to suddenly develop nuisance. Even when there's material that might raise an
eyebrow, the Nazi themed cafe somehow a good festival choice for your class,
there's plenty already in the initial premise onscreen, like the numerous
ridiculous pratfalls and sight gags, to amuse and catch your attention away.
Even the issue that one of our protagonists is a pervert, Ataru, is thankfully
something that also becomes nuisance, his clear romance with Lum something
which becomes a huge part of the plot in the end; even when literally given his
fantasy, as a result of plot machinations, her absence from him is felt and
immediately called out. Plus there are so many characters onscreen, and others
who take on just as many important roles, that it balances everything out. The truth
is that, ironically, it's Lum herself despite being a huge figure in the
franchise, and of this film's crux in terms of the resolution, who takes a
background part, an interesting issue when a sci-fi supernatural figure like
herself would've been the central premise in any other circumstance.
As for the world itself, of these
lovable food obsessed and manic figures, their idyllic farce is undercut by the
scenario when reality itself is distorted, where even when Lum exists as an
alien who can fly and has a miniature friend called Chibi she is no way near as
odd as when the tank abruptly appears in the school swimming pool, puddles of
water teleport people, and individuals vanish. As time stops, enough for a room
to be entirely covered in fungus and dust, and people eventually start to disappear,
the film for all its light heartedness gets serious when it needs to, two
diametrically different tones managing by pure, perfect preciseness to succeed.
The constant changes to reality are vividly depicted, the various houses of the
world being altered, from new floors to the school becoming a M.C. Escher illustration that bend
physics, to the plot eventfully turning the world into a post apocalypse where
the rules are even odder about their environment yet the buildings are ruined. Knowing
Beautiful Dreamer is not the highest
budgeted work, but still from this era of hand drawn animation, adds to how
incredible an achievement it is, especially as the later plot machinations go
as far as to include turning into genre vignettes and full blown cosmic psychedelic
with characters on strands of DNA. When its revealed what is going on,
thankfully it has a personification that its immediately memorable as a figure,
one who you feel sorry for even if they are as much responsible for turning the
film into an even greater spectrum of strangeness, between sci-fi pulp tragedy
to even half finished scenarios built with cardboard.
And the style is matched by the
moments of seriousness, which never override its comedic tone but work around
it to actually have a startling effect. The Oshii
I grew up with is here, first witnessed fully in one of the best scenes when
nurse Sakura encounters the being behind it in a taxi cab, possessing the
driver and getting into a conversation in a dark tunnel about how time is
merely a construct of human beings, a sober atmosphere but detailing Oshii's obsession with characters having
long philosophical discussions. Famously it would go even further to the point
as if deliberately goading the viewer - his tie-in novel to Blood: The Last Vampire (2000) called Night of the Beasts, an action vampire
story, stops halfway through for chapters of long discussion on vampire
mythology around a table - but here it works perfectly. The legend of Urashima
Tarō, a man who rode a turtle and did not age famous in Japanese culture, their
equivalent to Rip Van Winkle, is
evoked as is the idea of Zhuangzi, the
Daoist thinker who dreamt he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man and
developed an existential crisis as a result.
This all is still a comedy, one
which resolves everything for a new day, a new story, but the production pushed
the premise in drama and scope to an undeniable scale. It's for me because Oshii is such an obsessive for
extrapolating on ideas, that he's able to push these premises into interesting
tangents. Seeing one of his most overtly comedic works for the first time, it's
also amazing for who could be a cold director to also see his heart, a whimsy
here that is utterly lovably as well than absolutely suited to slapstick and
school days bonding, something I've never seen yet in his career. Sadly he'd
depart from the TV series by episode 106, going on far longer afterwards, his
relationship with the original creator Rumiko
Takahashi not by all accounts a great one and prone to conflict over ideas;
what he produced here, resolved around the love between Ataru and Lum, is such
a lovely, strange and delirious production I adored.
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| From https://i.pinimg.com/736x/3c/49/d4/3c49d4a5261cc6 1cb7e01f0109885356---anime-manga.jpg |
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1) One character who immediately
won me over, because his voice actor Akira
Kamiya was incredible, is Shutaro Mendou, a diehard military obsessive who,
in this world, can acquire an actual tank for the school festival cafe, has
access to a fighter plane and yet, for his seriousness, can break out in a
higher pitched exasperation when challenged or hoisted by his petard.
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