Nazo no tenkousei

This movie, while not the strangest yet, was one of the stranger movies I've seen to be sure. The story is about Midori Kagawa, a somewhat ordinary Japanese schoolgirl at a random Japanese school. A transfer student, Mayumi Iwase, arrives, and immediately strikes people as somewhat strange, hence the meaning of the Japanese title, Nazo no tenkousei, which basically means Mysterious Transfer Student. The subtitle, which was used for the US DVD release, The Dimension Travelers, together with the translated title, gives some clues as to the content of the movie, though neither title, nor the description on the back could ever have prepared me for the ride this movie took me on!

There were things said that, combined with what they showed you, gives ample food for thought. What are we doing? What effects will this have, not just on us but on the world as a whole? etc. At the same time, it didn't seem all that serious or deep. Interesting!

It is quite hard for me to tell you anything else about this movie without spoiling anything, but one thing I can say is that I would very much like a chance to read the novel by Taku Mayumura, on which it was based.

On a whole, I enjoyed this particular movie, and I'm very happy I got to see it.

During the late 90s and most of the 2000s there was a lot of directors who tried out their artistic skills with experimentation movies, Dimension Travelers is a great experience of what is real or fiction.

Midori is a high school student that lives a boring life, with arguments with parents, bullies as friends, and in her spare time she collect flowers and hide them in books in the library. One day a new student arrives, her name is Mayumi, eventhough she acts weird, she does fascinate Midori a lot and they become friends, finally Mayumi reveals to Midori that she is a dimension traveler and Midori is one as well, once Midori how to travel through the dimensions, she suddenly wake up in a psychiatric clinic, was it all just imagination or is the clinic a trick by the enemy?

The movie is brilliant of playing with our minds and also thanks to the girl who played the role of Midori, when she is a student she is a student, when she is in the clinic she acts like someone who could out of her mind, and when she play as an adult she is adult, it's great acting and according to the DVD by pulp cinema asia she was only 17 when playing the role.

I would recommend to everyone this 1990s classic.

This is a very unusual film. At first it seems like a young adult production, but, the dense, sometimes complicated dialog and lack of action makes this seem unlikely. As stated by another reviewer the first half is all suggestion and superior to the convoluted finale, which tries to explain the story without any explanations if that makes any sense. Dimension travelers literally ends with the same questions asked in the opening. Not for all tastes, but worth a look.

Old news, especially about sci-fi, but starts better than it ends. First half, where all is implied, promises more than the rest delivers. It's much easier to touch an audience's experience when implying, no matter how far out may be what you're implying, than when trying to show. (Compare best superhero movie ever, "Unbreakable," with baseball bat swinging "Signs.") I'm not sure "Dimension Travelers" ever passes the height it attains when Miyami (Yasue Sato) explains Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. At that point I hoped it might become, despite the school girl setting, a SCIENCE-fi film.

Touchpoints? "Le Jetée" (but not "12 Monkeys"). Various Phillip K. Dick. "Turn" (one of my more long-winded IMDb comments). "Fushigi Yugi." "Dr. Who."

Miyami's long, rather horse-like face, besides making her an excellent mystery figure in the early going, slightly suggests Gwyneth Paltrow. Note, also, Miyami claims to be Eurasian. But I see these things all over the place: a black and a filipino at work, each, if differently, looking like my Sicilian father.

There's a still up, no longer open-to-submissions, site documenting the portrayal of libraries in film. The list has no Japanese entries, but this is at least the third J-film I've seen lately that would have qualified. The other two are "Love Letter" and "Whisper of the Heart."

Liked a lot, and this is in the second half of the film, the scale model school Midori constructs in the mental hospital. Kind of like turning unexpectedly to a map page in a novel. But at the same time, making models, especially of a unique entity like one's own school, exhibits some of the weirdness, the slight perversity of doll play. Think also of the city model in Paul Auster's "Music of Chance."

The castle's "interior" at the end of passage 13 may be key to what the film is up to. Or maybe not. The director hardly explores it. Did he know what he had?

Promoting this film as a fantasy has done it immeasurable damage in American markets, guaranteed to disappoint fantasy enthusiasts while turning away those not so inclined. How in the world did Asian Pulp Cinema acquire US rights to this film? and why? Never mind; just forget the packaging and promo material for this film; this is NOT science fiction or fantasy - in fact, it's not a genre film at all.

This is a straight drama using CGI to flesh out a world the lead character may or may not inhabit (it may just be a delusion, with the whole story taking place in a mental hospital). It's ambiguous ending must therefore be respected as a determined effort not to answer many of the questions the film raises.

The film raises these questions by allowing this world to metamorphose repeatedly, tossing off vague hints of what might be the reality the lead has such a difficult time confronting; and in keeping with this personalities change repeatedly, in very subtle ways. The characters we see in the final sequence are clearly somehow not the people we first meet them as; yet these changes are not wrought through developing character traits, but simply effacing some traits and replacing them with others.

As with Christopher Nolan's "Memento" or the claustrophobic mystery "Identity" (at least until the end), it is best for the audience view this without the hope that linear narrative will at last pop up and make everything clear. However, the experience certainly left me with a strong, if mixed, emotional impression. Well-acted, carefully written, crisply directed. I recommend it to anyone interested in contemporary Japanese cinema, and not simply those interested in "pulp cinema".