‘Strawberry Mansion’ review: It’s 2035, your dreams are full of advertisements and making someone very rich.
Now at the Music Box Theatre and streaming via Music Box Films later this month, the beguiling, low-fi “Strawberry Mansion” is the kind of movie they don’t make anymore — not in the conventional, studio-era term of reassuring stories told and millions of hearts warmed, but as pure fantasy of consistently sprightly invention, special effects and animation elements with actual charm, and a spirit I can only describe as soulful.
It’s 2035. The federal government employs “dream auditors” to make sure people are paying their taxes on their dream lives. If certain objects pop up in a dream, they’re assigned a monetary value. One such auditor, the fedora-topped Preble , visits the country home of Bella . She’s living alone, serenely, with her chickens and a turtle, and an entire roomful of antiquated VHS tapes predating the 2035-era’s “airstick” method of recording dreams.What Preble finds on this particular job is even trippier than the previous paragraph indicates. As he starts sorting through and reviewing Bella’s tapes via a sparkly oversized virtual reality headset, Preble meets the 1985 version of Bella .
The filmmakers, who previously teamed on “Silvio,” and their inspired design collaborators take it from there and go, well, everywhere. “Strawberry Mansion” veers from seafaring episodes with man-sized rodents in snappy naval outfits to a magical isle where Preble and Bella find that anything is possible.
I like this film for many reasons. Its sensibility is truly a gentle one. The screenplay may not cohere in ways designed to please the dream-logic-averse, but its wit is neatly matched by the wit of the visual landscapes.‘Strawberry Mansion’ — 3.5 stars
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