English Dub Review: 18if “Dream Dimension α”

When I signed up to watch a trippy show about dreams, THIS was what I was expecting.

Overview (Spoilers)

Haruto enters the domain of a new witch and initially reacts with hesitation. Though she seems welcoming, he has incredible difficulty understanding her thought processes and her… really trippy domain. He tries to convince her to wake up, but she reacts violently to the thought. The real world has nothing for her, and she’s tired of everyone telling her to be brave and come out. Dr. Kats investigates the girl in her real-world home and finds something familiar, but when he arrives in the dream world, he slowly realizes that he knows this witch. He subscribes to her blogs, which seem to be about music and abstract art. But, she’s posted since she went into a coma. How does that work? The closing scenes reveal the truth. She is using her dream world powers to interact with the real world, blogging from her dream world computer. She asks how long Haruto has been asleep. Dr. Kats lets her know that he might need her help with that in the future.

The ending has pretty big implications on the effects of the dream world. Not only is she working and making a living while comatose, she’s even seen to be eating strawberries. While her body is across the room, her desk chair turns. A strawberry floats up to where her head would be if she were sitting in the chair, and bit by bit, it vanishes. She is apparently posting pictures that she and Lily took of Haruto inside the dream world. It’s interesting, and honestly, something I wish I could do. To conjure an image from your mind and be able to turn it into an image on your computer.

This actually brings up an interesting question: Is she really escaping reality? Or is she just an imaginative workaholic? In the real world, the girl is frail and sickly. She spent most of her time in the hospital, and couldn’t play with other kids or go to school. Going into sleeping beauty syndrome allowed her a creative outlet that made her not only partially functional but a respected blogger and an amazing artist. Of course, people will tell her she needs to wake up. That is the social norm, and people hate stuff that doesn’t conform. It forces them to reconsider what they think is normal. While the other witches are consumed by their domain and the feelings that pushed them into it, she wields it to allow her freedom and connection. So, is that wrong? Is this escapism?

For me, when I was depressed in recent years, I would turn to online roleplaying games done through IRC. For most, this would be an escape from reality. For me, it became an emotional shunt and a way to reach out to others. I would tell stories that mirrored how I felt. Through their narratives, I worked through my issues. On one hand, this built tales with incredible depth and raw emotion seeped in symbolism that only I and those that knew me would understand. Players would step into them, and feel as if they were a part of something big. On the other hand, I came out the other side clean of the pain that haunted me. One adventure I ran up and killed my self-hatred, symbolically and in reality. I’m free of it. What I’m getting at is that there is a fine line between deeply channeling your muse and running from reality. It’s hard for some people to understand it, and they’ll see what you’re doing and say you’re an escapist. They want to pull you away, without seeing the good that it is doing you. At the same time, you have to be careful not to go over the edge.

It seems odd, however, that Dr. Kats just whips out a pair of shades that let him see and hear Lily. If it was so easy for him to fix this issue, why did they make it one in the first place? Are they going to delve into this as we reach the end of the series? Oh, yeah. Make no mistake. The series is coming to a close in two episodes, and the plot is going to drop like a bomb. This series jumped in for some Haruto focus in recent episodes, and it is suggested his condition is one that is a problem. Will Haruto be the final witch?

Our Take

This episode was everything I’ve been expecting from this show since episode one. Trippy, psychological, difficult to process stuff, and psychedelic impressionist art. The backgrounds change from scene to scene, with some in grounded, but fantastical locales with childish humor and others a blend between Giger and Dali that float in a void. When I think of (other people’s) dreams, these are the visuals I conjure. They are gorgeous, striking, and evocative of deep and complicated emotions. I wanted to pause the show every time the shot changed to analyze what this new image was saying to me. I wanted to know what this LSD wonderland told me about Hanako’s thought process. By the way, the English dub changes her name from Hanako to Jane Doe. This is because Hanako (or Flower Child) was a very common girl’s name and can sometimes be used on legal forms requiring a first and last name of an unknown person. This switch out made the connection much more clear as to what she was intending with her name, so I think it was a good choice here.

As amazing as the background art was, I feel a bit conflicted about the character animation. The character art has an interesting line quality to it. It looks thin and sketched, giving an ethereal air to the episode. The quality of the animation varied wildly. I mean WILDLY. Some sequences had incredible smoothness and detail in the animation. Others, it feels like a few keyframes with little to no in-between and characters that were nowhere near their model sheets. One scene degraded from that form to look more like an animatic, done in a rough, lightning sketch style. However, the poses and style of motion being done in these lower-quality scenes are so good, it looks rotoscoped. While the fidelity is still low in the real world scenes, the animation is of higher quality than in other scenes. The odd animation and lack of fidelity aren’t an act of laziness or budget cuts. This is an active choice being made by the director, and it is trying to tell us something. The way the characters pose on the keyframes, how the events flow from one to another: this is how her dream world looks. She is a fine artist and photographer. She sees in still images.

Beyond the graphics, the writing flow is similarly odd. There is a good amount of silence, sometimes with the characters doing nothing but staring at each other. These awkward silences obviously have to mean, but I can’t always figure it out. Also, when Hanako unveils her music to them, the show suddenly switches into a screensaver with a dance mix and the characters stuck in animation loops. It’s a strange sequence, and it goes on far longer than I feel is comfortable. Then again, that may be the point. Lily tells Haruto to let go and dance during it. Perhaps this was an aside, telling the viewers that they need to just take a moment to experience this world and not drive forward to the next point of action or plot. This episode may have dropped a pointer at some plot, but the intent of the episode was the experience. I’m not sure if this approach to the flow worked or not, but it captured my attention.

When it comes down to it, this episode was what we were promised from the start. Trippy, but deep. There was a good amount of choices in the art, animation, and pacing that were halting or indulgent, but that may have been a part of the message. In the end, I think this was a good episode because it made me think real hard about these choices, and what they were trying to say. This episode was art, pure and simple.