Yume jû-ya - Ten Variations on Sōseki's Dreams/ IV

Well, the real fun comes with The Sixth Dream: everything is so weird from now on that any filmmaker needs all the courage in the world to keep the pace with the craziness of the stories.

(image from the movie: The Sixth Dream)

The Sixth Dream is about a bunch of folks living by 1900, watching in amazement an artist coming from the twelfth century and crafting a huge Kamakura sculpture in their presence.

Director Matsuo Suzuki went further and decided to make the artist come from the twenty-first century: a young guy colored blonde, wearing sun glasses and kind of astronaute dungarees, carving like in a trance, while dancing a robot-like dance, on the rhythms of some techno music, watched by the 1900-folks; the segment is done in black and white and the people watching the craziness look like some Kurosawa's farmers; one woman repeats as in a drunkness, muje - muje (a Japanese word that can be translated into amazing, unbelievable); the whole setting is kind of Kurosawa-like; so everything looks very 1900, but the guy in the middle; his dance gets faster and faster, the rhythms get wilder and wilder, things get off the scale; once the carving finished, music and dance stop, and the guy falls in ecstasy. Ten minutes of great, pure dementia!

(image from the movie: The Sixth Dream)

The Seventh Dream is a tale of desperation. A man embarked on a ship keeps on asking where's the ship going, and nobody, sailors, passengers, seem to pay any attention to him. As the story is advancing you start to realize that the ship is a metaphor for our life and what's the guy trying to find out is if there's any sense on Earth.

(image from the movie: The Seventh Dream)

In the end the guy commits suicide, just to realize in his last moments that even death does not free you from loneliness and despair.

Well, Yoshitaka Amano (helped by Masaaki Kawahara) transformed this story into a fairytale!

(image from the movie: The Seventh Dream)

Yoshitaka Amano is a well-known figure among Japanese Animé fans. He started to work in this field in the seventies and designed animated characters for TV series (like Final Fantasy and its sequels) as well as for some video games. He also illustrated fantasy novels and participated as character designer in the production of some animation movies.

(image from the movie: The Seventh Dream)

2006 was the year Yoshitaka Amano took also the responsibility of a film director. He created a video, Fantascope 'Tylostoma' (a 33 minute black and white animation: a man who appears every 700 years; stretching before the man's eyes the world rusted away to monochrome and gray; once the town was flourishing; it is now in ruins; one lonely person amid ruins; that person is a prostitute; a story of passion begins - AnimeNfo). This was immediately followed by the segment in the Ten Nights' Dreams, which is his first production for the big screen.

(image from the movie: The Seventh Dream)

So the Seventh Dream became a mixture of 2D and 3D animation, the ship became a great ballroom on the waves, the place of an uninterrupted carnival, an overwhelming symphony of colors. The segment of Yoshitaka Amano is what you call an eye catcher.

(image from the movie: The Seventh Dream)

A character was added to the story: a girl in white, the only one who is interested in the lonely man; the segment in the movie starts with her, and in the end, the man retrieves the girl within the deeps of the ocean.

Now, passing to The Eighth Dream, director Nobuhiro Yamashita kept only one paragraph from the book, while remaining quite faithful to the spirit of the original in a totally new story!

The paragraph (... I found about five oblong basins lined up to the left of the entrance; in them were a lot of goldfish-red ones, spotted ones, lean ones, fat ones; the goldfish seller sat behind the tubs; his eyes were fixed on the goldfish before him; he remained still, with his chin resting on his hands; he hardly cared about the busy people passing by; for a little while I stood looking at this goldfish seller, but all that time he didn’t move at all) is just the last scene of the segment (as it was the last one in the text). Actually in the movie, exactly at the end of this scene some big object falls unexpectedly from the sky.

What happens in the original text is that someone who's sitting for a haircut in a barber shop is witnessing various small scenes through the window, only each scene disappears instantly, as nothing happened. It's like passing through a chain of small illusions. As for the barber, he doesn't notice any of these images. He only observes the goldfish seller outside. The client will see the seller and his merchandise only when he leaves the barber shop, realizing that his presence is ignored. Is he real, or just an illusion himself?

In the movie a guy is trying to enter a room and starts talking to someone who's inside, to find himself suddenly in another room, in another house, talking to someone else, on a different topic. What's more, the guy is changing constantly his look, his dress, his age. Like in the text, nothing can be caught, the room, the house, the person he is talking to, the subject of the conversation, even the own identity. It is exactly like in a dream, everything is floating, and probably this segment renders a dream in the most accurate way.

Director Miwa Nishikawa was the only one who took a purely dramatic approach for his segment (The Ninth Dream). This way he put a definite distance to the text (in my opinion): the book offered in this chapter an elegant elegy unraveling the tragedy in just one sentence at the end (the father, whose safety the mother is so concerned about each night, has already been killed by a lordless warrior); the segment in the movie is telling the whole from the beginning. What's remarkable that the sad tale of a family torn by the war is rendered in a very solid way in only ten minutes (the short amount of time allowed for each segment within the whole movie).

(image from the movie: The Tenth Dream)

And here we are at the last dream. The cult-favorite Yûdai Yamaguchi (Jigoku kôshien - Battlefield Baseball) is a kind of mad genius. Once he gets the controls you can expect anything. His segment that mix animation and live action is a story about pig mutants, actually about humans becoming pigs and pigs becoming humans, actually about mutants who can be either way in any given moment: it's weird, it's creepy, it's crazy, it's disgusting - I couldn't eat anything any more that day, I cannot eat pork any more - the image of humans fattened by pigs cannot leave my mind since I saw the vignette of Yamaguchi - this segment is unforgettable.

(image from the movie: The Tenth Dream)

(Sōseki)