Dreaming Beautifully Part FIVE - End

PART FOUR-->>HERE

The dubbed version of this film was produced in 1996, and sounds like it.  While most of the casting is professional and talented, none of the English talent comes close to matching the spirit or the tone of the original.  T. Roy Barnes is a good actor and has a great voice for cartoon work; unfortunately he just doesnt sound like Onsen-Mark.  The school nurse Sakura gets the lions share of the dialog in the film, and Melanie Heads line readings are stiff and repetitive, flattening lines that should be bringing the more fantastic elements to life.  Overall the dub is representative of most dubs of the 90s competent but flat, with little of the thought and professionalism of todays dubs or the shameless rewriting and overacting of the 60s and 70s. Nitpicks: Mendo is referred to throughout as Shootaroo Mendow, and while Lums brother Ten is admittedly at the age where gender doesnt matter so much, its still glaring to see him referred to as a her.  The original Japanese voices are some of the best ever assembled; Id stick with them.

Central Parks DVD release is a good package, however; we get the original Japanese trailer and trailers for the AnimEigo release of URUSEI YATSURA  ONLY YOU as well as BEAUTIFUL DREAMER.  Theres also an art gallery of film stills and the fascinating Oshii commentary, moderated in part by Mr. CPM himself John ODonnell.  Not to mention the fine transfer of the original film, itself a masterful example of the high point of the hand-drawn age of Japanese animation.

A departure from the URUSEI YATSURA formula, BEAUTIFUL DREAMER is both beautiful and dreamlike.  It marks the boundary between straightforward, un-ironic storytelling and the more introspective, self-referential series that would follow. As an URUSEI YATSURA film it may not follow the rules, but then again, this is UY, what rules? If you miss your old-fashioned wacky URUSEI YATSURA theres always ONLY YOU or the TV show, produced in a world where Oshii and his staff work long days and endless nights, wondering if somehow they hadnt done all this somewhere before.

A previous version of this review was originally published at Anime Jump.