To be honest, Urusei Yatsura 2:  Beautiful Dreamer probably isn’t one of the greatest animated features of all time.  It probably isn’t even one of the best Japanese animations of all time.  What it is, though, is a surprisingly good and unexpectedly deep installment of a beloved anime series that came out of left field, surprising – and, to be honest, disappointing – many dedicated fans (and the show’s creator), but finding an audience beyond the normal ‘Japanimation’ devotees who appreciated its daring, its ambition, and its beautiful eeriness. 

Directed by Mamoru Oshii (who would later become famous for Ghost in the Shell and his “Kerberos” saga), Beautiful Dreamer, released in Japan in 1984, was the second big-screen adaptation of the wildly popular Urusei Yatsura anime series.  Like much of creator Rumiko Takahashi’s work, Urusei Yatsura was gentle, good-humored, slightly subversive situation comedy – in this case, it focused on the flighty, jealous Lum, an alien who begins attending a Japanese high school and constantly disrupts classes with her protective attitude towards her dimwitted boyfriend, Ataru.  However, this sort of story – along with the attendant physical comedy that marked the show – no longer interested Oshii, and he decided to take things in a decidedly different – and much darker and deeper – direction.

The story begins the night before the annual school festival, as the various student groups are putting the finishing touches on their themed homerooms.  (In a bit of the surreal humor that is to come, the main characters choose “The Third Reich Decadent Café” as their theme.)  However, the day has an oddly familiar quality to it, and when work is completed, everyone from students to faculty don’t seem to be able to get home that night, encountering eerie visions and surreal encounters on trains and cars, ranging from a haunting ‘product parade’ that stalks them through the streets to a subway line that never seems to reach its final destination.  After some rather unsettling, if hilarious, Groundhog Day-style humor, it becomes clear to Miss Sakura – a teacher at the school and a nascent mystic – that some supernatural force has enveloped them all and is tampering with their realities via their dreams.

The movie gets even stranger from there, becoming, by turns, a domestic comedy, a mystical battle, a post-apocalyptic survival story, and a haunting supernatural fairy tale.  It also remains an action-packed movie full of terrific set pieces, and a deeply philosophical treatment of the divide between reality and illusion and the nature of dreaming.  It’s not without its flaws; it’s not as meticulously animated as some of Mamoru Oshii’s later work, and it retains enough of the slapstick flavor of the original series that it’s not quite as profound as it would like to be.  But fans of the original show hated it and creator Rumiko Takahashi disowned it, necessitating its release through an entirely different production company, and that’s too bad  it’s certainly the show’s finest hour, and one of the real high points of the anime boom of the 1980s:  a smart, funny comedy that reaches far beyond its origins, and, in doing so, transcends them.