Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams is made up of eight dream segments, or vignettes.
Rather than telling one continuous conventional story, Dreams presents a sequence of episodes following a recurring figure identified as “I,” a surrogate for Kurosawa. The segments move through childhood memory, folklore, war trauma, artistic obsession, nuclear anxiety, death, and humanity’s relationship with nature.
The film’s episodes include “Sunshine Through the Rain,” “The Peach Orchard,” “The Blizzard,” “The Tunnel,” “Crows,” “Mount Fuji in Red,” “The Weeping Demon,” and “Village of the Watermills.” Their styles vary widely, from folkloric fantasy to stark allegory. Martin Scorsese appears as Vincent van Gogh in “Crows,” a role that often draws attention away from the film’s anthology structure.
The number can be confusing because Kurosawa originally planned more material. Production histories describe an early version with 11 sequences, later reduced to nine before filming, with another segment abandoned during production. The completed released film contains eight vignettes. Dreams was an international Japan–United States co-production financed by Warner Bros., with visual-effects assistance from George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic.