Strawberry Mansion

Dreams are the realm of Morpheus, where the subconscious sorts through the mental viscera of our lives, filing it all away employing some inscrutable and oddly specific classification system (teeth loss has a separate wing all to itself). In the world of Strawberry Mansion, which takes place just a stone’s throw away in 2035, dreams are also the realm of the federal government. Our visits from the Sandman are recorded on memory chips and scanned by a computer that determines how much in taxes we owe from the previous night’s reverie (oh hai Neurolink!). James Preble (Audley) is a dream tax auditor, his own monochromatic dreams filled with product placements for soda and fast food; not a very encouraging omen.

James is tasked on this day to journey to the home of Arabella Isadora (Fuller), who lives in the titular structure, rising singularly among a remote green meadow. Responding to a letter the free-spirited Arabella has written, James discovers a backlog of dreams that have gone untaxed. There are about 2,000 of them, and they’re all on VHS. As James begins his audit of the eccentric artist’s dreams, he encounters the young Arabella (Glowicki), and the lines of reality begin to blur.

With a modest budget that belies the eye-popping visuals at play, filmmaking duo Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney have affectionately crafted a sweet romance surrounded by the tart crunch of satire. When Arabella’s villainous son arrives to destroy his mother’s dreams, James is sent on a whirlwind quest. Through endless seas and blizzards, he navigates dream after dream to find young Arabella and save himself. Sailor mice, caterpillars, a blue demon, and a frog with some mean saxophone chops populate a handcrafted universe of practical and computer effects, stop-motion animation, and good old-fashioned camera trickery. The larger themes swirling around Strawberry Mansion, the financial exploitation and commercialization of the last bastion of unbridled freedom, are cleverly handled if a bit undercooked. But they are perfectly suited as the frame to drape this charming, oddball comedy around.