Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (DVD)

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But after the admonitions of imminent disaster, the movie ends on a note of relative calm with "Village of the Watermills," the writer-director leaving us with the hope of peace and tranquillity if we would but embrace the simple life. It is close to a paradise he describes in this last portion of the film, but a paradise that can only be found by looking for it and working at it. There seems to be a bit of Thoreau implicit here: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" Good advice 150 years ago and good advice today. It is a fitting conclusion to a contemplative film of frequently awesome beauty and spectacle.

Video:
Appropriate to the showy splendor of many of the episodes, the film's colors are brilliant and alive in an anamorphic widescreen transfer that measures a ratio of about 1.74:1 across a normal television. However, the picture's delineation is not always perfect, leaving a small degree of blurriness across the screen as well as a bit of roughness around the edges of many images. Together with some wavering lines, some overly dark indoor scenes, and just a hint of grain from time to time, I'd have to say the video quality is good but not topflight.

Audio:
The Dolby Stereo Surround does a respectable job in the front speakers, conveying a fairly wide spread across the listening area. But the front center channel still gets the bulk of the signal, nor is there a lot of rear-channel information being fed to the back speakers. Loud voices sometimes echo in the rear and torrents of wind are heard from behind us in the storm segment, but that's about all. Add in a touch of hardness to the sound, a limited frequency response at the top and bottom ends, and a hint of background noise at louder levels, and you get workaday audio reproduction.

Extras:
Warner Bros. are fairly skimpy on the extras here. I've watched some excellent documentaries on Kurosawa that WB might have sought out and included, but didn't. Instead, all we get are a few director film highlights, a cast and crew listing, an itemizing of awards, and thirty-one scene selections. Japanese is the only spoken language provided, but there are subtitles in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, and Korean. Oddly, the English subtitles were slightly obscured on the left-hand side of the screen for the film's first couple of minutes, but the problem soon cleared up. Can't say what was happening; just one of those things, I guess.

Parting Thoughts:
Don't expect traditional storytelling from "Dreams." The various segments are what they are, snippets of dreams. They are short, most often undeveloped vignettes; brief, moral tales emphasizing visual splendor, imagery, and imagination over conventional characterization and narrative.

"Akira Kurosawa's Dreams" may never be ranked among the director's greatest epics, but it is surely one of his most personal films. It may seem self-indulgent to many viewers and admittedly it has its ups and downs, tending to drag in places. But its overall effect is a balm to the senses. It is a fascinating and, in its own way, daring piece of filmmaking from a fascinating and daring filmmaker, who in his later years was able to thumb his nose at critics and make the films that he wanted to make. More power to him.

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