“It’s like they’re perverted aliens from some unknown world!” This from a guy viewing his own family, and who loves them despite their eccentricities, in Katsuhito Ishii’s 2004 profile of the extended Haruno clan, who live in a sleepy rural prefecture where nothing much ever happens. Except for the wandering ghosts. And the buried yakuza corpses. And the giant imaginary version of herself that trails the Harunos’ 9-year-old daughter around. And did I mention the albino guy dressed in orange, who does free-form choreography down by the river? He’s there, too. Ishii renders this group like a sitcom family living under some antipodal Miyazaki spell of enchantment. No one seems particularly bothered by the weirdness, and the film’s sparing use of CG effects—like a train barreling through the teen son’s forehead—seems to spring from ordinary emotions and domestic cues. The son has a crush at school; the mother is trying to revive her career as an animation artist; and the father, a hypnotherapist, occasionally puts everyone into a relaxing trance. The movie has something of the same effect—bizarre daydreams erupt without consternation or comment, then Tea subsides back into a lulling and not unpleasant REM state.