Adaptation Insanity: The one that was an anime more anime than anime

 

Title: Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer

What Year?: 1984

Classification: Unnatural Experiment/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/4)

 

As I write this, I’m rounding out the month while editing an actual novel, and I decided it was time to do another entry in this still-new feature. It also happened that I’ve been down an extra rabbit hole with a decades-old multimedia franchise I’ve only just heard of. That brought me to one particular artifact I decided to write up for this feature, even though it is animated. As we will be seeing, however, it’s also a very odd treatment of a strange and often retrospectively horrifying property. Without further ado, I present Urusei Yatsura 2, a film based on a franchise where a literal stalker and a compulsive womanizer are the couple we’re supposed to want to get together.

Our story begins with a contest between clubs at a high school whose student body includes Ataru, a slacker who harasses every female in sight, Lum, an alien with electroshock powers who insists she is already married to him, and Mendou, a rich kid who can afford his own tank. As events progress, the cast begin to notice things that are odd even in their frame of reference. Soon, they find themselves in an empty city where electricity, water and food simply appear without explanation, an arrangement the slacker seems happy to accept at face value. But the rich kid and his self-described spouse are determined to get to the bottom of it. They discover that the familiar cityscape is really a reproduction floating in space on the back of a turtle, but even that may still be an illusion. It’s up to the slacker to find the truth, and along the way, he must confront the nature of reality and his relationships!

Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer was a 1984 theatrical animated film, the second based on the manga and anime series created by Rumiko Takahashi. The film was written and directed by Mamoru Oshii, also the director of the preceding film Only You, reportedly with little or no participation by Takahashi. The film was released in Japan in 1984, and on US home video with an English dub in 1993. It was initially poorly received by fans of the manga/ anime series, but became well-regarded as a pioneering anime film with themes that anticipated later works such as Ghost In The Shell. (Dammit, I’m going to have to do that one…) It is currently available for free streaming on Tubi.

For my experiences, this all started because someone introduced me to the original Urusei Yatsura manga, which I have found simply mindboggling. I would have to give it a separate writeup if I was going to cover it at all, but it will suffice to say that I can only find it comprehensible by comparison with my own Exotroopers series (see the Samus figure post/ rant): These are characters who are and should be absolutely horrible, yet are entertaining enough for us not to want them to die. After going through a few volumes of the manga run, I came to the present film, and I found something different and much stranger. What I found especially striking was its timing, obviously well after the beginnings of anime (compare with Castle of Cagliostro and Lily CAT) yet still well before it took the forms we would take for granted now. As a corollary, it is a full-blown case of what I call the Anachronistic Outlier, for once already noted by many besides me, with the especially curious tendency of comedies and parodies (see Dark Star, Twitch of the Death Nerve and less auspiciously Galaxina) to be more innovative than “straight” treatments from the same time and even significantly later. That, of course, leaves the question whether it is good, and a lot will depend on taste and mood.

Moving forward, the main thing to get out of the way is that this film very much presumes prior familiarity with the franchise. If you don’t understand the characters, relationships and assumed world already (or like them in the first place), you aren’t going to have many chances. The paradox on this front is that this does not become a source of “insider” humor. Indeed, the movie doesn’t have that much in the way of humor, beyond the bizarre situations and wildly flawed characters already built into the franchise. On a deeper level, the film genuinely shifts the perspective, which in turn becomes foreshadowing of what will be revealed. When the focus moves to the secondary characters, the “stars” simply look like idiots that nobody else would have any reason to care about, unless of course this world was literally built around them. The final twist is that when the actual main character takes charge, he really does manage to think through the situation.

That leaves the story’s visual, and that brings us to one more paradox, little if anything here is “psychedelic” or even surreal. The “baseline” style is semi-realistic human characters in realistic and often very detailed environments. I will say personally that this is absolutely a believable portrayal of how “real” mental illness works, and I will shout loudly that it makes for an exponentially better payoff as the dream world encroaches on the setting. It should be of further note that even then, there is not a fundamental change in the animation style, which is where certain pros and cons come in. Again, it is effectively acknowledged that people who experience hallucinations often perceive them as part of the actual world. On the other hand, many sequences simply feel like a sane person’s idea of madness, which I have already ranted about. Per my longest-running complaint, the part that films like this often overlook is the breakdown of the very sense of the passage of time and linear causation, which is exactly where even the severely delusional will realize they are hallucinating without necessarily pulling out of it. The most intriguing example is Shinobu’s encounter with a spectral girl whose status is never made clear as her own surroundings become distorted. She clearly realizes that this is not the “real” world, yet this is still short of the terror of total breakdown.

That leaves the “one scene”, and the one I knew I would go with is exactly at the half-hour mark. At this point, a nurse/ priestess who is easily the most intelligent and consistently competent character in the franchise has gotten in a cab at night. She voices the suspicion that the ride is taking longer than needed. The cabbie starts to talk, quite charmingly, and this becomes our introduction to the antagonist, voiced by one Draidyl Roberts in the English dub. He begins with what could be a casual joke that time feels slower in a cab. That leads into a metaphysical ramble in which he asserts that time, space and reality itself are all products of human perception, all while the lady clearly grows more aware that this is not simply a talkative driver. What keeps this interesting is that none of his points are inarguable in universe. Human perceptions of the universe may be shaped by all manner of biases, but it will become clear that this character’s own angle is talking up his own power to warp reality. Even so, the lady is already able to see through his illusions. What matters is that this battle of wits is clearly just beginning, which is exactly why a good scene like this matters.

In closing, what I find I come back to is my own feelings about anime. I’ve already regularly commented that people who know me would expect me to be a lot more of a fan than I am. The underlying reality is that I have never tried to “follow” anime in any comprehensive way. That means that I have undoubtedly missed a lot that is very good, and even more that is very, very bad. I consider the present film a good example of why a little anime can be better than a lot. It’s a well-made entry in a long-running series that requires some background knowledge but not a detailed knowledge of everything that came before. Perhaps most significantly, it’s a well-regarded and influential anime that was never hyped up into a “classic” you have to watch for fans to take you seriously. (No way I’m naming names…) It’s just good fun from a time when that was still the benchmark for the artform. Watch it, if you have the time, and you won’t be disappointed. With that, I’m calling it a day.