Audience reviews
10 · Sample from the first available page, separate from the total number of ratings.
zettai-jin-stray
The first masterpiece from the genius Oshii and an especially enduring one. With the weight of accumulating cultural memory and imaginary in the historically emptied Tokyo, a dream of wastes emerges, perhaps a childish one, and yet war does not give way here such as in Assault Girls. The dead thought of the phantom thesis of the age distorting perception of time and space. An endless everyday giving way to listless indulgence. The means of production in consumer society causes natural and real processes of production to fade from consciousness, food and essential utilities are magically continually supplied to the characters. The tired feeling of riding the night train nowhere. The birth of a certain expression of culture parasite was facilitated by Oshii in 1981, and, as ahead of the time…
Read at the sourcemrspenguindrum
Beautiful Dreamer, directed by Mamoru Oshii, is a film that deviates significantly from the original Urusei Yatsura series, elevating humor and surrealism to an unexpected level. Though based on a lighthearted and comedic series, the film delves into existential and philosophical themes, using comedy to explore the nature of reality and the boundary between dreams and wakefulness.
The core plot follows Ataru and Lum as they prepare their attraction for the school festival, but the atmosphere soon shifts when the characters realize that time has stopped, trapping them in an endless loop of the same day. This distortion of reality opens the door to deeper reflections on the meaning of life and the perception of the world around them.
Oshii crafts a dreamlike and unsettling world, where fam…
Read at the sourceNeimaj
Ah yes, the only Urusei Yatsura movie people actually give a shit about. Let's talk about it. So, here's a funny joke, I drew a complete blank when writing this review. Talking about this film is going to be difficult for me, and I'm not going to summarize the film like I did for the previous one. I will talk about the premise of the film, however. Tomobiki high school is starting up a cultural festival and the first thing I immediately noticed was that quality of this film was much higher than the previous one. Within the first five minutes of the film, it's already pretty hectic with students, props, entertainers, and all kinds of shit running around. The main cast of characters are also preparing by making...what I first thought was a Nazi themed restaurant, but I'm not entirely sure. T…
Read at the sourcelethargilistic
So, obviously the main reason I watched this without watching the show was because Mamoru Oshii directed it. But it was also available in English on Amazon Prime when I had other things I needed to do, so that made doing so pretty convenient. It's a good movie. I just felt like I was missing a lot because I didn't know the characters and it's a very characterization-driven story. It seems like it's almost fair to say the story doesn't make sense if you don't understand Lum's dynamic with the rest of the cast. At it's most basic level, it's not too complicated. But, on another, there was a really good scene where a character performed some process of elimination to figure out what was going on and it all came down to the relationship web. Which, honestly, was a pretty impressive payoff even…
Read at the sourceOtaku1985
In my early days of anime fandom, Rumiko Takahashi was probably the first mangaka whose works I was heavily into. My favourite of her manga series? Maison Ikkoku. When it comes to anime adaptations though, Urusei Yatsura would top my list.
It says something about Mamoru Oshii as a director, that he is able to achieve something like making this film and not compromise on the humour and tone that run through UY as a whole. All the elements that this film introduces just astounded me upon first viewing, as most hollywood films similar to this weren't to come along for 9 years (groundhog day being the key example here).
The quality of artwork is quite a leap from the tv series and also the first UY film. For a film made in 1984, it holds up surprisingly well.
All in all, this film will make…
Read at the sourceFAKEANIMEGIRL
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This is one of Mamoru Oshii‘s earliest directed movies, and like many things he’s touched it has a cult following that simply goes nuts for it. What makes Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer an outlier, however, is that it’s created using a previously existing setting and cast of characters that weren’t originally created by Oshii. The legendary Rumiko Takahashi takes credit for the original concept here, about a high school boy who accidentally convinces an alien girl named Lum that they’re now married. Thus, hijinks ensue. The original series has had an incredible impact on Japanese culture, but is relatively esoteric for a Takahashi work due to its comedy placing a heavy emphasis on referen…
Read at the sourceRyntaia
"Things are a mess for Yusojusunku, time and space are objective things. Fact is, time is simply a creation of your human consciousness. Now, what if there ain't no human beings anywhere in the world? Wouldn't clocks and calendars be a waste? Maybe there ain't no such thing as time that flows in one direction..."
Ah, the Urusei Yatsura series--one of the flagstones of the 'Rumik' empire, and probably Takahashi's very first legitimate hit series. The last thing someone would expect to go well with Rumiko Takahashi's slapstick wild style of character writing and gag jokes would be Mamoru Oshii, the man best known for directing Ghost in the Shell. But here, in the second Urusei Yatsura movie, it was decided that the film should be helmed by Oshii himself. It results in a fun, wild, surreal…
Read at the sourceBowlingJD
What happens when director Mamuro Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) and creator Rumiko Takahashi come together to make a movie? Well, in 1984 the second Urusei Yatsura movie debuted. It is regarded as the best of the Yatsura movies by the fans. An interesting fact was after the “failure” of the first movie; Oshii wanted to stop catering to the fans and do the film his own way. This was so far from the original show that Takahashi almost rejected the script. How did it turn out?
Urusei Yatsura is a wild and crazy time with all of the characters interacting behind Ataru and Lum. It is a hilarious non-stop comedy fest with little regards for a story and primarily focusing on making the viewer laugh. However, Oshii went the opposite and minimized the slap-stick humor and created a plot, and story in…
Read at the sourcerkoujirou
Urusei Yatsura is one of my favorite anime series for many reasons, and one of those reasons is the wacky brand of comedy that comes with it. That said, Beautiful Dreamer is completely different from any other work related to this series. The comedy is still there, but it's greatly toned down and replaced with more of a serious story as the cast of characters find bizarre things happening to the world around them. It's a drastic change to the usual feel of the series, but the end result is something I've long considered a masterpiece.
The story, of course, is fantastic. The art is very good for its time, that being the early 1980's, and the music fits perfectly with what's going on in the movie. But one of the things I enjoyed the most about this movie relates to the cast of characters. N…
Read at the sourcecobrascope
The Ursei Yatsura franchise & TV series is an insane, wacky, hyperactive, frantic, comedy show with most of its humour rooted in Japanese culture and in general it's not really my cup of tea. However the director, Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, whilst using the characters and setting of the TV show tones down the madcap slapstick nonsense a notch or two and instead creates a trippy, surreal, philosophical film concerning dreams and how they interact with reality. It's still a comedy but this has got miles more depth than anything seen in the TV series.
Without any knowledge of the TV series this film will probably baffle newcomers with its strange cast of weird characters and its odd and unreal universe. However if you can get past that obstacle then there's a really clever and…
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