Urusei Yasura #2: Beautiful Dreamer CPM 90 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 09/01/1998 Reviewed: 09/06/2005

Back To U Listings

Every time I watch Urusei Yatsura I get this incontrovertible feeling of Deja Vu. I don't recall the series ever being televised, I don't recall ever renting the tapes -- or even being the patron of a place that would rent them -- and I certainly have never bought anything of the matter prior to the DVD format. Unless I have a split personality that dabbled in the laser disc market then there's just about no way that I'd ever seen anything even tangentially related to Urusei Yatsura prior to the year 2000. All the same, I can never get over this sinking suspicion that I've experienced the mis-adventures of Ataru Moroboshi and crew on many separate occassions. And more than once I've known the plot of episodes before I've even seen them. This is a strange coincedence because, as we all should well know, the story of the second Urusei Yatsura has to do with strange things like phantom lives and deja vu. It's almost as if I were living confirmation of the phenomen... only without copious hot babes (who vacilate between sexy biker punks and scantily clad aliens) and millionaire friends who have access to tanks and jet fighters. I mean, my life's pretty cool, but it's not "1980s Mamoru Oshii anime" cool.

I've found I have a soft spot in my heart for Urusei Yatsura for many reasons. I don't often care for latter-day Rumiko Takahashi works like Ranma and Inuyasha, too bogged down in their own idiosyncracies to be any sort of palatable. Urusei Yatsura, being the first big hit of Takahashi's, doesn't reek quite as much of self-plagarism as her later manga/tv efforts would. That's a possibility, that it doesn't suck because it's the original, but I'm sure it also has something more to do with this being the sole Takahashi series that the posturing, philosophising Mamoru Oshii had a hand in. You can tell from the DBZ-esque escapades of Inuyasha (and its total lack of Descartes) that Oshii wasn't around for any of that sort of thing. Even better, unlike some of Oshii's this isn't a snoozer. It doesn't hold a candle to the jargon-filled Twilight Q from the same era, but it still sometimes misjudges the amount of circular babbling the audience will sustain before dozing off. Don't get me wrong because that's often exactly what I want from a film, but I never really understood how this kind of stuff could fly from a series that was essentially made for a bunch of dorks clamoring for green haired alien boobies. Suffice it to say that Urusei Yatsura is not a book that can be judged by its cover.

While preparing for the school festival some of the crew start to realize that they're basically performing the same day over and over again. This revelation is proffered mainly by the generally awesome Onsen Mark, who I immediately have a rather prominent man-crush on due to his gruff attitude and middle-agery. Soon it is revealed that deja vu isn't the only problem facing the cast and crew. A rather excessive escape attempt is made when the group (some ten-strong by this point) have the ingenious idea of crowding onto a Harrier jet and flying to somewhere that smells a bit less crazy. This proves to be a practical impossibility. A cursory Harrier-sweep of the surrounding area reveals to both the cast and the viewer that the world is no longer as it seems. Their small portion of the town has been excised from the Earth proper and is having a hell of a time drifting through space on the black of a flying stone turtle. The story of Beautiful Dreamer is often likened to that of Urashima Taro, a fisherman who rescued a turtle and, in return, was taken on the turtle's back to the Dragon Palace... when he returned to his home three hundred some years had passed and all his friends were dead. I'm not exactly sure why this story is subject to comparision. The only similarity between this movie and Urashima Taro is the turtle thing and I pretty much have to discount that because people in Japan pretty much just love to put things on the back of giant turtles. Have you ever played Golden Axe?

That should be about all I need to say in the subject. Everything in that game was on the back of something. Town, fortress, mobile transport it didn't matter. Turtle seemed to be the standard MO. For whatever reason Beautiful Dreamer desires to adhere itself to these conventions, despite it really having no purpose in the plot of the movie. That's okay. Sometimes crazy and weird can be kind of fun, and it's cool how they managed to do it back in the day... you know, without loads of breasts and cleavage clogging the screen all the time. It might seem like a leap of the imagination, but sometimes people used to make stuff that didn't involve robot sex workers in bondage outfits. At least not all the time. It's nice when things work out that way, without the boobies. Back in the day you could make a movie like this with a pervert main character and get away with a three second shot of a topless girl in a corner of the frame who barely even moves and that'd be considered fanservice. Let's not go crazy and say this happens in all cases, because there's crap out there like Megazone 23: Part 2 that certainly proves me wrong, but it's nice when you stumble upon a spot of that good stuff. I don't suppose this movie will be of much interest to anyone who doesn't like the delicate balance of talking heads and female breasts, but those who do will find a welcome home in Beautiful Dreamer.