Time is a flat circle
A review requested by Andrew, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
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Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer was a film ahead of its time. 29 days ahead of its time, to be specific. The animated feature was first released in Japan on 11 February 1984, a date of no specific significance except that Miyzaki Hayao's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released on 11 March 1984. And the great financial and critical success of Nausicaä had a tremendous impact on the Japanese animation industry, reigniting an interest in animated theatrical features that had been waning ever since the larger Japanese film industry had started to take a beating in the early 1970s. More specifically, highly artful animated theatrical features, ones trying out new and unusual things with the medium, and the stories that could be told through it. It created an opening in the market that was quickly exploited by ambitious young filmmakers, including filmmakers like Oshii Mamoru, whose third feature, 1985's Angel's Egg, was one of the boldest, most stylistically and tonally radical films from this era of Japanese animation (or, indeed, most other eras of animation in Japan or anywhere else). It was also ahead of its time, and tanked, but still.
As for Oshii's film directly prior to Angel's Egg, well, that just so happens to be the very same Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer that I was just talking about. It's the second feature based on the television series Urusei Yatsura, itself adapted from the first major manga series by Takahashi Rumiko, one of the most important manga artists of her generation. The first feature, Urusei Yatsura: Only You, was also directed by Oshii, and he was the supervising director on the first two seasons of the series; by the time it came to make a second feature, in other words, he was pretty well bored of the show, and had on top of that had a very disappointing experience making Only You, which he felt had been compromised by the need to fit the needs of an ongoing series and the expectations of its fanbase. For Beautiful Dreamer, he basically went rogue, writing a screenplay by himself with no basis in the manga, one that made the rest of the Urusei Yatsura team, including Takahashi, rather unhappy; nor was it terribly well-received by audiences on its initial release. And to be fair to the naysayers, there's no denying that the film's grasp exceeds its reach, perhaps even by a lot. This is using the raw materials of a goofy genre-bending teen comedy - most importantly, the financial and technical resources of such a show - to try to tell a story about reality itself and how we as barely-perceptive human beings interface with it. It's stretching as far it absolutely can, and you can see places where the seams are pulled tight, until you're convinced they're about to start tearing.
But I must say, not for the first time, there's no problem that a work of art can have quite as enthralling as "it's too brave and trying to do too much". Oshii would later declare this to be the proper start of his career as a filmmaker, the place where he started to work out what animated cinema could be. Speaking as a viewer who sometimes finds the later Oshii a bit forbidding in how much his films are willing to let ideas trump drama, but who always finds his films to be overwhelming, exciting displays of visual bravura (and I have already tipped my hand a bit about finding Angel's Egg to be an absolute all-time masterpiece), I can absolutely see it. I don't know much at all about Urusei Yatsura, the series or the manga - my sense is that it's quite a bit weirder and more inventive than a cursory glance at its genre and logline would imply - but I can barely imagine a broadly popular episodic television series trafficking in the kind of wall-to-wall reality-bending that Beautiful Dreamer is playing around with.
Even just summarising the film's plot is barely possible without fully embracing spoilers, since the firs 50 or 60 minutes of the film basically consists of a whole bunch of thoroughly confusing, absurd, and at times nonsensical stuff, none of it seeming to fit together at all, and there's eventually a moment where we're told, "you know it seems like the fabric of contiguous reality has broken down, and everything is random? It is, and here's the reason why." Somehow, I found this tremendously comforting even though it still doesn't actually make much sense; it's just that the not-making-sense suddenly clicks into place, and becomes more about how people are complicated and don't always know how to express themselves, than it is about "random nightmare shit". That being said, there's something really wonderful about the random nightmare shit. Okay, so time to summarise at least a little: there's a group of high school kids centered around Lum (Hirano Fumi), a space alien from a species named oni, the name of a kind of terrifying giant monster in Japanese folklore, though other than her tiny horns, it's not clear that Lum is meant to evoke such creatures. There are four dumb boys all jockeying to be around her as much as possible, but she only has eyes for Ataru (Furukawa Toshio), the boy who saved humanity from the oni by beating Lum in a game of tag. This put a strain on - indeed, ended - his relationship with Shinobu (Shimazu Saeko), who by the time of Beautiful Dreamer seems to have largely realised that she's better off, but she's still rather clearly bitter about the whole thing. All of these people, as well as a couple of other kids and adults from school, are preparing for an upcoming festival, and this somehow involves establishing a Nazi-themed coffee shop, with a multi-ton tank as its centerpiece. How much of this is comic shenanigans typical of Urusei Yatsura, and how much is Beautiful Dreamer starting to go a little wackier than is good for it, I cannot say. "Nazi-themed coffee shop" really threw me off my stride, though, I can say that much.
Anyway, this is basically enough to get us up to the film's first scene; from there, the cluster of ten or eleven souls starts to realise that, for no clear reason, time seems to have stopped flowing. Or, more precisely, that they always keep circling back to the same place and the same moment, unable to leave the city; roads and rail lines just seem to invisibly bend back in, and no matter how much time passes, they always end up back to now. The longer this goes on, the more that the sphere of the available world shrinks, and the gloomier things become; the school eventually begins sinking into a dark mire, and the world ends in an abyss not very far beyond the school grounds. Also, as they're able to discover after flying a private fighter jet owned by the family of philosphical rich kid Mendou (Kamiya Akira), the entire world, such as is left of it, stands on the backs of several massive stone statues that resemble people who have gone missing as the realm of available time and space has shrunk. And those statues are on the back of a massive turtle. This immediately puts the more literary-minded among the group in mind of the story of Urashima Taro, one of the most famous of Japanese folk tales, about a man who rides a sea turtle to the underwater Dragon Palace, where he spends an enjoyable couple of days during which centuries pass by in the world of mortals. This observation doesn't give them much of anything to work with, but it does cast a sufficiently gloomy mood over everything else.
That gloomy mood is the first of the two great joys of Beautiful Dreamer. The second, which comes after the reveal, is the sense of reality folding in on itself and perception being reduced to the limited human being's best attempt attempt at guessing what's happening in the reality all around them. Basically, Beautiful Dreamer is sort of like what happens if Groundhog Day invisibly shaded into Paprika, and both were sharing space with a goofy sitcom about horny teenagers, but the visuals were dedicated to crafting a frozen snapshot of an apocalyptic world in the middle of its collapse. It's a lot, and whether or not it all fits together is in the eye of the beholder; I frankly think it could have done with maybe two fewer horny teens to keep track of, but I concede that I am not the ostensible target audience (the actual target audience is hard to identify), who would already probably know who these people are. At the very least, Oshii and his team of background painters are going wild in creating a vision of a city that seems cold and still while we're looking at it, only for it to have very suddenly decayed even more when we return to it. The film favors dark colors and compositions with lots of empty space, forming a contrast with the bright, simple line drawings of the characters. It all creates a very strange mood, a combination of animation-as-High-Art and low budget TV cartoon comedy in one body, such that it's hard to say if it's a teen comedy that keeps shuddering as it has to pass by the dark places, or if it's a clammy and oppressive portrait of a vast, empty cosmos bearing down on us that's addicted to telling jokes.
Either way, it's definitely pretty wild, and I cannot fault the Urusei Yatsura fans who wanted nothing to do with it. It's a film that's constantly throwing confusing, inexplicable things at us, taunting us with puzzle pieces that don't fit together. At the same time, it's maybe not wild enough. Much of the most striking imagery in the film feels very much like a test run for Angel's Egg, in which Oshii was able to create an even richer, more textured, and more suffocating vision of an apocalyptic world that breaks more fully, and thus more comfortably, from the definite TV-scale approach on display in Beautiful Dreamer. Without looking to the future, though, and seeing just how much more ballsy and wild the director could get, this is quite a remarkable thing. And there's a lot to be said about the tension between its warring identities, and how that very tension feeds into the last part of the story, which is in large part about having a difficult time reconciling all of the elements of your personality into one shape. It is maybe more the harbinger of truly great films to come than a truly great film itself, but it has a ton of ambition, and it looks about as striking and atmospheric as I suspect it could have, in 1984. I can't say there's nothing like it now, but I suspect there was very little like it then, and that's still pretty damn good.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Do you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer was a film ahead of its time. 29 days ahead of its time, to be specific. The animated feature was first released in Japan on 11 February 1984, a date of no specific significance except that Miyzaki Hayao's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was released on 11 March 1984. And the great financial and critical success of Nausicaä had a tremendous impact on the Japanese animation industry, reigniting an interest in animated theatrical features that had been waning ever since the larger Japanese film industry had started to take a beating in the early 1970s. More specifically, highly artful animated theatrical features, ones trying out new and unusual things with the medium, and the stories that could be told through it. It created an opening in the market that was quickly exploited by ambitious young filmmakers, including filmmakers like Oshii Mamoru, whose third feature, 1985's Angel's Egg, was one of the boldest, most stylistically and tonally radical films from this era of Japanese animation (or, indeed, most other eras of animation in Japan or anywhere else). It was also ahead of its time, and tanked, but still.
As for Oshii's film directly prior to Angel's Egg, well, that just so happens to be the very same Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer that I was just talking about. It's the second feature based on the television series Urusei Yatsura, itself adapted from the first major manga series by Takahashi Rumiko, one of the most important manga artists of her generation. The first feature, Urusei Yatsura: Only You, was also directed by Oshii, and he was the supervising director on the first two seasons of the series; by the time it came to make a second feature, in other words, he was pretty well bored of the show, and had on top of that had a very disappointing experience making Only You, which he felt had been compromised by the need to fit the needs of an ongoing series and the expectations of its fanbase. For Beautiful Dreamer, he basically went rogue, writing a screenplay by himself with no basis in the manga, one that made the rest of the Urusei Yatsura team, including Takahashi, rather unhappy; nor was it terribly well-received by audiences on its initial release. And to be fair to the naysayers, there's no denying that the film's grasp exceeds its reach, perhaps even by a lot. This is using the raw materials of a goofy genre-bending teen comedy - most importantly, the financial and technical resources of such a show - to try to tell a story about reality itself and how we as barely-perceptive human beings interface with it. It's stretching as far it absolutely can, and you can see places where the seams are pulled tight, until you're convinced they're about to start tearing.
But I must say, not for the first time, there's no problem that a work of art can have quite as enthralling as "it's too brave and trying to do too much". Oshii would later declare this to be the proper start of his career as a filmmaker, the place where he started to work out what animated cinema could be. Speaking as a viewer who sometimes finds the later Oshii a bit forbidding in how much his films are willing to let ideas trump drama, but who always finds his films to be overwhelming, exciting displays of visual bravura (and I have already tipped my hand a bit about finding Angel's Egg to be an absolute all-time masterpiece), I can absolutely see it. I don't know much at all about Urusei Yatsura, the series or the manga - my sense is that it's quite a bit weirder and more inventive than a cursory glance at its genre and logline would imply - but I can barely imagine a broadly popular episodic television series trafficking in the kind of wall-to-wall reality-bending that Beautiful Dreamer is playing around with.
Even just summarising the film's plot is barely possible without fully embracing spoilers, since the firs 50 or 60 minutes of the film basically consists of a whole bunch of thoroughly confusing, absurd, and at times nonsensical stuff, none of it seeming to fit together at all, and there's eventually a moment where we're told, "you know it seems like the fabric of contiguous reality has broken down, and everything is random? It is, and here's the reason why." Somehow, I found this tremendously comforting even though it still doesn't actually make much sense; it's just that the not-making-sense suddenly clicks into place, and becomes more about how people are complicated and don't always know how to express themselves, than it is about "random nightmare shit". That being said, there's something really wonderful about the random nightmare shit. Okay, so time to summarise at least a little: there's a group of high school kids centered around Lum (Hirano Fumi), a space alien from a species named oni, the name of a kind of terrifying giant monster in Japanese folklore, though other than her tiny horns, it's not clear that Lum is meant to evoke such creatures. There are four dumb boys all jockeying to be around her as much as possible, but she only has eyes for Ataru (Furukawa Toshio), the boy who saved humanity from the oni by beating Lum in a game of tag. This put a strain on - indeed, ended - his relationship with Shinobu (Shimazu Saeko), who by the time of Beautiful Dreamer seems to have largely realised that she's better off, but she's still rather clearly bitter about the whole thing. All of these people, as well as a couple of other kids and adults from school, are preparing for an upcoming festival, and this somehow involves establishing a Nazi-themed coffee shop, with a multi-ton tank as its centerpiece. How much of this is comic shenanigans typical of Urusei Yatsura, and how much is Beautiful Dreamer starting to go a little wackier than is good for it, I cannot say. "Nazi-themed coffee shop" really threw me off my stride, though, I can say that much.
Anyway, this is basically enough to get us up to the film's first scene; from there, the cluster of ten or eleven souls starts to realise that, for no clear reason, time seems to have stopped flowing. Or, more precisely, that they always keep circling back to the same place and the same moment, unable to leave the city; roads and rail lines just seem to invisibly bend back in, and no matter how much time passes, they always end up back to now. The longer this goes on, the more that the sphere of the available world shrinks, and the gloomier things become; the school eventually begins sinking into a dark mire, and the world ends in an abyss not very far beyond the school grounds. Also, as they're able to discover after flying a private fighter jet owned by the family of philosphical rich kid Mendou (Kamiya Akira), the entire world, such as is left of it, stands on the backs of several massive stone statues that resemble people who have gone missing as the realm of available time and space has shrunk. And those statues are on the back of a massive turtle. This immediately puts the more literary-minded among the group in mind of the story of Urashima Taro, one of the most famous of Japanese folk tales, about a man who rides a sea turtle to the underwater Dragon Palace, where he spends an enjoyable couple of days during which centuries pass by in the world of mortals. This observation doesn't give them much of anything to work with, but it does cast a sufficiently gloomy mood over everything else.
That gloomy mood is the first of the two great joys of Beautiful Dreamer. The second, which comes after the reveal, is the sense of reality folding in on itself and perception being reduced to the limited human being's best attempt attempt at guessing what's happening in the reality all around them. Basically, Beautiful Dreamer is sort of like what happens if Groundhog Day invisibly shaded into Paprika, and both were sharing space with a goofy sitcom about horny teenagers, but the visuals were dedicated to crafting a frozen snapshot of an apocalyptic world in the middle of its collapse. It's a lot, and whether or not it all fits together is in the eye of the beholder; I frankly think it could have done with maybe two fewer horny teens to keep track of, but I concede that I am not the ostensible target audience (the actual target audience is hard to identify), who would already probably know who these people are. At the very least, Oshii and his team of background painters are going wild in creating a vision of a city that seems cold and still while we're looking at it, only for it to have very suddenly decayed even more when we return to it. The film favors dark colors and compositions with lots of empty space, forming a contrast with the bright, simple line drawings of the characters. It all creates a very strange mood, a combination of animation-as-High-Art and low budget TV cartoon comedy in one body, such that it's hard to say if it's a teen comedy that keeps shuddering as it has to pass by the dark places, or if it's a clammy and oppressive portrait of a vast, empty cosmos bearing down on us that's addicted to telling jokes.
Either way, it's definitely pretty wild, and I cannot fault the Urusei Yatsura fans who wanted nothing to do with it. It's a film that's constantly throwing confusing, inexplicable things at us, taunting us with puzzle pieces that don't fit together. At the same time, it's maybe not wild enough. Much of the most striking imagery in the film feels very much like a test run for Angel's Egg, in which Oshii was able to create an even richer, more textured, and more suffocating vision of an apocalyptic world that breaks more fully, and thus more comfortably, from the definite TV-scale approach on display in Beautiful Dreamer. Without looking to the future, though, and seeing just how much more ballsy and wild the director could get, this is quite a remarkable thing. And there's a lot to be said about the tension between its warring identities, and how that very tension feeds into the last part of the story, which is in large part about having a difficult time reconciling all of the elements of your personality into one shape. It is maybe more the harbinger of truly great films to come than a truly great film itself, but it has a ton of ambition, and it looks about as striking and atmospheric as I suspect it could have, in 1984. I can't say there's nothing like it now, but I suspect there was very little like it then, and that's still pretty damn good.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
