Product Details

• Actors: Akira Terao, Mitsuko Baisho, Toshie Negishi, Mieko Harada, Mitsunori Isaki
• Format: Color, Subtitled, NTSC
• Language: English, French, Japanese
• Subtitles: English
• Rated: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Warner Home Video
• VHS Release Date: March 20, 1991
• Run Time: 120 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (150 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6301942647
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #172,975 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Produced with assistance from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Dreams is an omnibus of eight short stories and parables that spell enchantment at every turn. The opening story, "Sun Under the Rain," emerges from director Akira Kurosawa's personal memories, as a child (whose house is modeled after Kurosawa's childhood home in Koishikawa) witnesses a fox's wedding ceremony in a magical forest. The Garden of Eden motif continues in "The Peach Orchard," while Lucas's ILM special effects group shines in the glorious "Crows" segment, in which an art admirer finds himself living within the paintings of Van Gogh (played with concentrated energy by Kurosawa enthusiast Martin Scorsese). In the idyllic closing fable, "The Village of the Watermills," a centenarian claims that "people nowadays have forgotten that they are also part of nature." The equally wise Kurosawa reinforces the old man's claim through these vivid but ultimately life-affirming tableaux. --Kevin Mulhall

From The New Yorker

Not one of its eight segments feels like a real dream. The kind of power that Kurosawa aims for, and intermittently achieves, in this picture is less oneiric than ceremonial. The film is a succession of sweeping dramatic gestures and lofty incantations performed in an atmosphere of hushed solemnity. The second half of "Dreams" is weak: the fifth episode, "Crows," about a fantasy encounter with van Gogh, is a thin conceit; and the remaining three segments are all static, self-conscious, and didactic. But there's greatness in the film's first hour. The opening segment, "Sunshine Through the Rain," is the vision of a small child who wanders into a forest and witnesses a wedding procession of foxes; the sequence has a wholly original sense of the rapturous fear and awe we feel when we first come upon the wonders of the natural world. The second episode, "The Peach Orchard," is also lovely (though its mood and pace are too similar to those of the first). The third segment, "The Blizzard," about four men trapped in a snowstorm, is all snow, howling-wind effects, and bleak, undifferentiated vistas of despair, until Kurosawa pulls a miracle out of the white void; a woman in long black hair and diaphanous robes appears to the party's leader as he battles sleep. It's a transcendent image, perhaps the most piercing ever made of the desires that keep people from surrendering to death. And the fourth episode, "The Tunnel," about a man returning from war and encountering his dead comrades, is a brilliant, hypnotic piece of filmmaking. Its images are simple, stark, and resonant, its dramatic shape is lucid and classically satisfying, and its rhythm is overwhelming, unstoppable; it moves with a sorrowful marching pace, the rhythm of grief. With Akira Terao, who plays the dreamer in six of the segments; Mieko Harada as the Snow Fairy; Martin Scorsese as van Gogh; and Chishu Ryu. Cinematography by Takao Saito and Masaharo Ueda. In Japanese. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In Dreams I walk with you, September 16, 2003

By 

Zack Davisson "japanreviewed" (Seattle, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (DVD)

Akira Kurosawa's dreams are better than mine. If this is what he saw when he closed his eyes, then I can understand how from that mind sprang the Seven Samurai and the rest.

"Dreams" is maybe the most personal, most "Japanese" of Kurosawa's films, and along with that it is perhaps the most difficult one for Western audiences to appreciate. This is saying nothing against Western audiences, but many of the themes and myths on display may not be familiar, and the imagery and metaphors may be lost without the appropriate background. I definitely appreciated it more after living in Japan, and becoming familiar with the countries folklore and literary story-telling style. Hina Dolls, the Yuki Onna, the mountain villiges like islands of tradition amongst concrete modern Japan...

"Dreams" is beautiful, on a purely visual level. The cinematography is exquisite and the colors and light are displayed with the eye of a painter. It is appropriate that Van Gogh plays a role in one of the many dreams. Like Van Gogh, the stories in "Dreams" are expressionistic and vivid, yet with the subdued emotions that is the hallmark of Japanese literature. This is not the wild, raw statement of a younger Kurosawa.

Story-wise, the dreams play with the themes of death and loss, both human and of nature. The displacement of Japanese forests, the lack of safety standards at nuclear power plants, the loss of traditional Japan, the pointless loss of lives in war...melancholy themes at best. Yet at the end, hope is offered, in a small nook and cranny, like a flower blooming amongst concrete.

The DVD itself is a small disappointment, and I would rather have this belong to the Criterion Collection, but better to have it than not have it.

50 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great film more people should watch, February 22, 2001

By 

Brescian Lander (milford, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dreams [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This film has in it some of the most beautiful cinematagrophy I have ever seen. If reviews where it is criticised as being slow or arrested worry you as to whether you should rent or buy it I would judge it like this: if the thought of walking through an art gallery and taking several minutes to sit or stand in front of some pictures to fully study and appreciate their beauty seems "slow" or "arrested" to you then you might not like it, if you can imagine yourself enjoying watching an expresionist/art noveau/surrealist set of pictures come to life on your tv screen then you might like it. I am dissapointed in those critics who can't imagine the medium of movies having value unless they are built around a fast paced linear plot line. These are the same people who probably think poetry is a bunch of rubbish and "Finnegan's Wake" is an unreadable waste of time. I hope and pray and fantasize that the studio that owns the rights to this movie will release it in greater numbers, drop the price, and (glory of all glorys) release it on dvd. It is one of the greatest movies of one of the greatest directors of all time and should be more accesible.

32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A trip through a genius' dreams, August 16, 2006

By 

Alejandro Castillejos "Elessar" (Tapachula, Mexico) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (DVD)

With an eight-stories sequence, Kurosawa expresses the magic of chilhood, the importance of perseverance and resistance, the beauty created by Van Gogh, war and atomic menace unleashed spreading their horror, and, last but maybe most important, hope an joy when the travel finishes. A film not to be seen once but many times, and getting amazed on each.