When the Fall is All That’s Left: Mamoru Oshii’s “Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer”

By Bob Clark

The careers of most celebrated anime directors, generally speaking, begin on television, and one might say that if they’re lucky, they remain there. Sure, filmmakers like Miyazaki and Takahata are renowned and beloved the world over for their feature works, but there’s a liveliness and spontaneity to the workmanlike stuff they did for Japanese television in the early parts of their careers that often matches, sometimes even exceeds their most critically acclaimed (or to put it more honestly, critically approved) works. Like many, they did time producing adaptations of long running manga series where they first got a chance to sharpen their skills as directors. Miyazaki’s first feature film “Castle of Cagliostro” was an extension of his highly entertaining years on the action-packed thief comedy series “Lupin the 3rd”, and plenty of other directors have followed suit beginning their career translating comics to the small and big screen. Occasionally, you’ll even get somebody who began on original work retreating into existing material, like Hideaki Anno did after the emotionally exhausting double-header of “Nadia” and “Evangelion”, turning on a dime away from existential sci-fi to adrenaline-injected high school rom-com in “His and Her Circumstances”. There, having already sharpened his skillset and developed his authorial voice, he inevitably wound up butting heads with the original mangaka and eventually had to quit and cede control to his collaborator Kazuya Tsurumaki, a turn of events that Mamoru Oshii would face after his second directorial feature, “Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer”.

Oshii has since described his experiences making this film as one of the first times he ever felt truly in full command of the movie-making experience, and indeed it’s easy to see the earliest developments of his trademark obsessions with existential philosophy and spiritual concerns in this story, even at its most absurd and slapstick-inspired moments. Though it’s merely part of a long running franchise created by one of modern manga’s most beloved artists, Rumiko Takahashi, the film quickly establishes all the stock characters and dilemmas needed to get a grasp on its increasingly surreal structure. On the eve of a calamitous high-school festival, a group of teachers and young students– including the constantly leering pervert Ataru and Lum, the sweet-natured, but jealous alien princess to whom he’s betrothed thanks to a set of contrivances that rank as cartoonish even for a cartoon– slowly come to realize there’s something not quite right in their neighborhood. Trains and busses loop without ever taking them to their destinations. Time and space bend enough to turn their school grounds into an M.C. Escher nightmare after dark. Most perplexing of all, time seems fixed to keep them repeating the same date of just before their school’s festival, with nobody else around them noticing. So armed with a tank, a harrier jet, Shinto-shrine exorcism equipment and a couple of huge bottles of tranquilizers and laxatives, the responsible ones do their best to try and uncover the mystery unfolding surrounding their new reality. Everybody else, of course, just does their best to party.

At a first glance it’s an exhausting checklist for any movie attempt, even before you get to the fact that this is a franchise effort. Oshii has to handle both the antic comedy of the television series he directed the bulk of, and the more somber, meditative pace that would gradually blossom into high water marks of the form like the “Patlabor” films and “Ghost in the Shell”. In some places, his work evokes masters of surrealism like Bunuel and Renais, and even looks forward to modern comedy classics like “Groundhog Day”, which does not only the time-loop conceit a decade ahead of Ramis, but also locates around it a similar tonal juggling act between clowning around and sober soul searching, with a not dissimilar ignorant lout at the center as well. The biggest difference, and one that makes for a viewing experience that’s at once more conventional but also maybe just a little more challenging, is the fact that Oshii offers a whole group of characters tackling with the existential dilemma that Bill Murray soldiers with alone in the Ramis film. We get to see a whole host of different reactions to being trapped in the same day repeated into eternity, played to their own kinds of comic upheaval and somber thoughtfulness. And once the illusions are shattered and the true nature of their world is revealed over the course of the movie, we’re treated to a series of fantastical and conceptual visions that rival or even beat the dream-world domino effects that climax the works of Satoshi Kon or Christopher Nolan.

Furthermore, there’s something at the heart of this film that Kon only developed in fits and starts at the start of his career in the more hostile “Perfect Blue”, that Nolan still hasn’t quite managed entirely, and that even Oshii has only occasionally equaled with the same level of panache and playfulness. When the dream-worlds at the heart of this film begin to collapse on themselves, we feel their loss and threat in a way that we don’t quite with the others because Oshii has done a fantastic job of making us grow attached to the dream, in large part thanks to the dreamers. There’s a great deal of fun to be had as Oshii plays games with Rumiko Takahashi’s stock high school characters and pitches them into situations that test their patience with the world, each other and themselves, and a big part of what makes it fun to watch them scramble is that he also just lets us have fun watching them have fun themselves. Whereas most of Oshii’s other films can be so resolutely dour and abstract that the only note of warmth or humanity to be found is when he gives his beloved basset-hounds a cameo, here we get to watch Ataru, Lum and company throw parties as they prepare endlessly for the high school festival, and camp out like children with the house free to themselves. There’s a genuine sense of joy in the film, of familial bonding for the motley crew of characters (quite beside themselves of course), and even love, as Ataru and Lum’s respective places in the center of the fantasy force them to confront what each really means to the other.

In the end this would be the last work that Oshii directed in the “Urusei Yatsura” series, which would quickly be steered back into Takahashi’s influence as she went on to develop more and more popular manga like “Maison Ikoku”, “Ranma 1/2” and “Inuyasha”. What would follow both for Oshii and the crew he left behind would be equally interesting– Oshii would double down on the avant-garde enigma “Angel’s Egg”, and his former collaborators would create the teasingly comedic cult classic “Project A-ko”. Both that latter film and “Beautiful Dreamer” would eventually become some of the major gateway experiences for anime fans in America thanks to being broadcast on the Sci-Fi Channel, with Oshii’s film occupying the prestige spot in an anime film-festival series 20 years ago. Hopefully we’ll soon see the film get a proper Blu Ray release beyond Japan, and maybe it can be a gateway into the dreams of future otaku and cinephile alike. Then, we’ll have the best pleasure of all, and be able to share it with friends the same way Ataru and Lum do, beyond the end of the world.