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 (co-director and co-screenwriter Kentucker Audley, who made the film with co-director and co-writer Albert Birney), visits the country home of Bella (Penny Fuller). 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 (played by Grace Glowicki). There’s something sinister afoot: The same bucket of chicken from a franchise called Cap’n Kelly’s keeps popping up, in a product placement sort of way. In this near future, advertising has infiltrated our dream lives. Who needs the Super Bowl?
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. Throughout the film, free-associative dream logic inspired, loosely, by other filmmakers — Michel Gondry of “The Science of Sleep,” Terry Gilliam of “Time Bandits” and various avant-garde animation wizards — comes and goes. There are echoes, too, of Boots Riley’s more recent “Sorry to Bother You,” though that was a far darker imagining of a ruthlessly corporatized and monetized citizenry.
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.
And to see Fuller, in particular, luminous as ever at 81, is a gift.
‘Strawberry Mansion’ — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
No MPAA rating.
Running time: 1:31
How to watch: Through Feb. 24 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave.; available to stream Feb. 25 via Music Box Films.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
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