Mamoru Oshii directed Only You, the first film in the Urusei Yatsura franchise. It was not a pleasant experience for him. Despite being a Part One, Only You left Oshii little room for personal creativity, the title already belonging to a wider, fan-driven franchise, with a TV show and manga. It was really Rumiko Takahashi’s show, with Oshii a mere technician to deliver fluid animation of someone else’s heart, soul, tone and creation.
Though he first found professional success as a “Urusei” storyboarder – hence the swift promotion to director – Oshii was not content with the mere joyous, comic product mangaka and fans expected. Nope, Oshii was an Artist, with deep, profound messages to impart upon the world – that is to say, he’s an amateur philosopher with decent access to drugs and Europe’s art house triumphs, your Godards and Fellinis and Melvilles and Bergmen. And so, furthering his own myopia, franchise be damned, Oshii hijacked the Urusei Yatsura brand name, central characters and all, to write and direct Part Two, Beautiful Dreamer.
As an example of how atypical Beautiful Dreamer is, “Urusei” creator Takahashi was barely willing to let Oshii’s screenplay go into production. But obviously it was produced anyway, precisely as Oshii envisioned it – at which point the director was loosed from the series, to develop his own high-falutin’ auteur name with, among other works, Ghost in the Shell and something called Patlabor 2. So we’re dealing with someone who possesses evidently no significant sense of humor, having self-assigned him the task of continuing a satirical anime series in his own particular idiom.
Beautiful Dreamer is therefore a gigantic anomaly in the series, so much so that its U.S. distribution is by a completely different company. Appropriately, then, that U.S. anime fans, without perhaps as much of a vested interest in the overall “Urusei” universe, have responded far better to Beautiful Dreamer than Japanese audiences, who look at it as a part of the larger Urusei Yatsura franchise…and find it wanting. To be dead certain, as a piece of a series, Beautiful Dreamer is a shambles, a sorry excuse for a sequel. The only thing keeping it from being a “sequel in name only” like Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the presence of every single franchise character. Visually, at least, for there’s very little of their personalities as I understand – frankly, there’s hardly any personality at all, as Oshii is notoriously unconcerned with characters or plot as a rule.
Going in, given the overall series premise, you cannot fault me for expecting something vaguely sci-fi-ish, and also comical and romantic. Hell, even dropping some of that, surely the mere sci-fi conceit –invading aliens (this summation completely misrepresents the series, by the way) – ought to provide Oshii with the grist he needs for atmospheric, unfriendly visual poetry.
No, that whole assumption was ill-founded, though damned if I know what Beautiful Dreamer is actually about...No, wait, I do. It’s about dreams, which is kinda obvious now, though it takes the movie a good long while to get there – in fact, it’s nearly two hours of surrealistic expressionism, justified at the end with the ever-tiresome “all just a dream” copout. The process of actually reaching that moment, though, is Kafkaesque, and resolutely refuses to make sense on any level if you don’t already share its attitudes. Beautiful Dreamer comes of a melancholic personality – in other words, it’s clearly not Takahashi’s work – someone who feels Truth can only be gotten to through angst and ennui and lotsa equivocation about reality and humanity and time and, well, things get pretty well unraveled thematically, narratively, you name it, by the time this thing is through.
Though circumstances start out reasonably normal, in that Urusei Yatsura sense of the word, with the familiar characters – Ataru, Lum, Shutaro, Shinobu, Megane, and many, many others I’ve been unable to identify/distinguish – all working together on a project. It’s the day before the big school festival, and they’re creating a coffee shop. Specifically the Third Reich Decadent Coffee Shop – this is the section which makes sense. In a rare, isolated example of an attempt to do something pertinent to a Urusei Yatsura character, it is suggested Ataru’s own “weird tastes” have dictated this Nazi theme – because, sure, the world’s mightiest pervert would also be Hitler-crazed, right? (Ilsa says so.) Cue a slapstick electricity routine involving a WWII tank they’ve shoved in the middle of the school building – again, this is the sane section – slapstick wholly opposed to the Oshii self-pitying approach, but something a Urusei Yatsura cannot be completely expunged of.
Already warning bells are sounding, and not just the random excess of fascist imagery. Scenes are filmed (if that’s the right word in animation) to be just a little surreal, a little experiential. The setting rarely moves away from the high school – the “normal” location in a franchise that has the whole universe as its playground – but even so, Oshii is intent to show our own urban world as a minimalist, alienating wasteland. It’s kind of like the city-bound scenes in The Matrix, and it’s no mistake that the Wachowskis were basically trying to make a live action Oshii movie there – which ignores the fact that Oshii has made live action movies, such as The Red Spectacles, which was apparently his chance to redo the themes first broached here, but beyond the stifling control of the dread Takahashi, still dominating over Oshii’s precious, precious temperament.
I think I got distracted. So things are already sort of noirish, forever pessimistic and dour as if that were the automatic way we see the world – this is what I mean by having to share Oshii’s existentialism to really go along with this movie. I miss the gigantic mallets and space bikinis of Only You.
Then the next day comes, only it’s not the next day, but really the same day, the festival still one day away. That’s right, the strangeness becomes official with a Groundhog Day scenario, the entire “Urusei” roster sequestered together into a closed time loop. They become aware quickly enough, but not with the surface level ease of that Bill Murray classic. Rather, characters – minor characters, at that – gather in a non-Hitler coffee shop like in an Edward Hopper painting, and have debates about déjà vu and whatnot. It’s all so pseudo intellectual, like a college freshman who’s just caught wind of ontological doubt, and it takes it seriously. Add to that visuals which resolutely do not follow together in any evident manner, like tent-dwelling sewer monks and never-ending rain puddles…
There’s so little connect from one moment to another, despite all the subtitled mutual mental masturbation, making any attempt at a standard recap pretty hopeless. More and more Beautiful Dreamer is evidently an Art Film first and foremost, employing just enough Urusei Yatsura imagery to avoid actually being a Criterion competitor. With all the chiming bells and casually unrelated visuals, it’s like a Buñuel film, like Un Chien Andalou, and for you to really get a sense of the strangeness I’m referring to, here is a goodly chunk of that indecipherable movie (which, I must warn, shares Salvador Dalí as a director).
It seems whatever heady idea a character proposes, it comes to reveal itself as true, as their world dismantles slowly into a morass of surrealism. As the days repeat, we move beyond the Sisyphean ordeal of Groundhog Day, through a disconnected panoply of other semi-sci-fi seminal set pieces. The world crumbles into disrepair, and soon everyone not trapped within the time loop is simply gone. It’s a Road Warrior world, our characters sleeping by night in Ataru’s house, and spending their days in the latest alien setting while they further debate the ontological merits of the space-time continuum, or whatever. “Civilization has come to an end.” Thank you, random voice which never appears at any other stage. It’s like every ten minutes we enter a new movie!
And then they’re living in Dark City! Boy, Beautiful Dreamer is best summed up by citing assorted other flicks which quite likely took some inspiration from here. There is no surfeit of imagination in Beautiful Dreamer, but it leaves one feeling so at a loss to actively engage the material. Now it’s just a waiting game to see if anything sensible comes of this stream-of-consciousness lunacy, and if things can reset themselves so that Part Three can make some sense, franchise-wise.
For now the world is a two-kilometer Flat Earth, upon the back of a gigantic flying space turtle, the missing characters granite pillars beneath the turtle further holding the world up. We’re a long way from Groundhog Day here. We’re an ever further way away from Only You, or anything functionally relating to Takahashi’s creation. Honestly, I cannot see just what in Beautiful Dreamer necessitated the use of these specific characters, except that Oshii needed someone to plug into his nightmarish hellscape, and might as well use those pre-existing creations closest at hand. This is somewhat artistically insincere, to be honest, as it doesn’t actually compliment or construct anything from the franchise; it just cannibalizes that franchise in whole, like using Avatar as the basic for hardcore pornography, or something.
With each new mini-premise entirely rewriting the rules, one can see why dreams will have to become the answer. Even then, it’s not that simple. Just who’s dream is this? Not that it matters, perhaps, as personality doesn’t account for anything. There’s the suggestion that characters are juggling dreams, shifting from one’s psychosis to another’s – yup, the germ, or inception if you will, for Inception is in here as well, but just as encased in pretentious muck as anything else.
Then again, we’re just as well in Nightmare on Elm Street territory, not in terms of anything as straightforward as a specific genre, but in the sudden artless introduction of Mujaki, an immaterial dream entity.
The introduction of a new explanation is actually a chance for new wrinkles – it’s all meant to get the audience questioning its own reality, but again, I’m not predisposed to do that (but having once been a teenager, I did once ponder such preposterous ponderances). Nicely enough, no matter how nutbars things get, the visuals are always nice. In fact, skipping back to that Groundhog Day section, it’s visually where Oshii is best able to convey the notion of loops (using a trick similar to those recycled Hanna Barbera backgrounds). His dialogue sure can’t get the job done.
Ignoring however many other strange notions of alienation, loneliness, misery and melancholia Beautiful Dreamer throws at us, if must end with that “all just a dream” ending – an ending which says it was simply Ataru’s own diseased mind (if I’m reading this right – likely not) that conjured up the twenty-six some odd layers of impenetrable brain candy. Thank goodness for that, too, for it means in the greater series story we can reject Beautiful Dreamer without it affecting things one whit.
That’s just what Japanese audiences did, angry like Takahashi herself that this has evidently so little to do with Urusei Yatsura. Hell, Oshii barely even managed to get Lum in her iconic yellow bikini, which is just unforgivable. This is kind of interesting, in franchise terms, as a perfect example of just how far a sequel can stray. It proves that sequels are necessarily products of compromise, between creators and perpetuators and fans. If one of those sides – here, perpetuators – gets too much power, the balance of a sequel – not wholly artistic, but not wholly commercial – falls apart.
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