When your loyal Screengrab culture monkeys were compiling yesterday’s list of the greatest animated features of all time, there were a few that got left out. As the inevitable legions of ‘you-forgotsies’ descended on the site, we were reminded of some of these; but one of them simply didn’t occur to us until after the list had already gone live.
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.
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