Review for Dream Eater Merry - Complete Collection

Introduction

I knew absolutely nothing about Dream Eater Merry when I first got the review discs. I certainly knew that MVM were releasing the series, and I had at some point scanned the blurb, maybe glanced at a series synopsis. It certainly didn’t take though, and for the first time in a long time when it comes to anime, I went into a show cold. It’s also the first time in a long time that I was in love with a new show in just five minutes. It took just five minutes for me to realise that Dream Eater Merry was a show that I simply had to watch. It took me that long to get a handle on its premise, and it took that long for me to be sold on its visual aesthetic, with an opening sequence that somehow seemed to meld the outrageous energetic wackiness of FLCL, with the sheer surreal imagination of Madoka Magica. Those first five minutes had me in silly grin mode, as I realised that I might just have something very special on my hands. I hope that the subsequent five hours live up to that initial promise.


Dreams are real, nightmares are real, and the creatures that inhabit them are very real. It doesn’t sound too plausible, but there are creatures, dream demons that very much want to live in the real world, and they do so by attacking the dreamer as they sleep, taking their body as a vessel. Yumeji Fujiwara may just be the next target of a dream demon, especially when he starts having a recurring nightmare about being hunted by an army of cats. The cats promise that their boss is coming in the next dream, and that doesn’t bode well for Yumeji. Then Yumeji literally bumps into an odd girl on his way home from school. Merry Nightmare is a dream demon who found herself in the real world, with no memory of how she got there. She’s been looking for the way back to the dream world, and for that she needs to find people about to have a nightmare visitation by a dream demon. She hopes that she can drive back the dream demon, prevent them from coming into the waking world, and follow them back home. With Yumeji about to have a visitation, he looks like her best bet. Even if this time doesn’t work out, Yumeji might be able to help her. He’s got a unique ability to see people’s auras, and he can foretell just what kind of dream they are going to have.


Thirteen episodes of Dream Eater Merry are presented across two discs from MVM.

Disc 1
01. Dream and Reality
02. Dream and Hope
03. From Beyond the Dream
04. Dream Eater Merry
05. Bewildered By Dreams
06. The Encounter with Dreams
07. Dreams, Swimsuits and the Colour of the Ocean

Disc 2
08. Dream Gallery
09. Disturbed Dream
10. Without Waking Up From the Dream
11. Guardian of the Dream
12. Bad Dream
13. Dream Again

Picture

Dream Eater Merry gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer on these two discs from MVM. The master is supplied by Hanabee in Australia, and gets a PAL conversion, complete with 4% speedup. The image is clear and sharp throughout, and absent compression artefacts or significant aliasing. Other than a frame of pixellation at 1:50 into disc 1, there’s really no complaint to be had with the image on these discs, bringing across the animation with clarity and without flaw. The only way to improve on this would be to get the show on Blu-ray, and for that you would need to go for Sentai’s release, which would require a Region A player. Evidently it has an interlaced transfer.


Dream Eater Merry deserves a good transfer, as the subject matter of the story is the most visual possible. It’s about dreams after all, and the dream realm allows for all manner of surreal and fantastic imagery, and a plethora of animation styles. I was initially struck by the opening sequence with the comparison to Madoka Magica and FLCL, but with Dream Eater Merry, every dream offers the opportunity to do something a little different, render the images in a different style. It’s just in the real world that the animation becomes a little more mundane, and even when the animators use stylish direction and different perspectives, it can look a little weak in comparison. This is especially so in the earlier episodes, where character animation is simplified too much, to the point where it is a static image with just a mouth flashing open and closed. Fortunately such miserly animation is rare in this show. The character designs are pretty well accomplished, with Merry in particular making for a memorable heroine. The world designs impress as well in terms of detail and style, both in the real world and in the dream realms. Other than the odd moment of weakness in the animation, it looks like a big budget show.

Sound

Dream Eater Merry offers the usual options of DD 2.0 English and Japanese, with translated subtitles and a signs only track. I had a brief heart flutter when I realised that the subs and signs were player locked to the audio, so while you get subtitles with Japanese audio that you can’t turn off, you get a signs only track with the English audio that you can’t turn off. I then remembered that these aren’t Kazé discs, which means that they don’t screw the subtitles up. You get all the information you need, subtitles and signs correctly displayed if you watch the Japanese audio. The only complaints will be from native Japanese speakers who can’t switch the subtitles off, or from Hard of Hearing dub fans who need a subtitle track to support their viewing.


I watched the Japanese version, and was very happy with the voice actor performances. The dialogue was clear throughout, and other than a single typo in episode 10, the subtitles were free of error and timed accurately. It’s a shame that there isn’t a surround track, as Dream Eater Merry has some effective action set pieces, while the various dream vistas have inventive sound designs to them that could have benefited. The stereo does do enough to immerse you in the show though. Dream Eater Merry also really excels in its music. The theme songs are the usual toe-tapping j-pop, but the incidental music is a lot more creative and eclectic than the usual anime soundtrack. There are some very unusual pieces of music here that once again really enhance and reflect the various dream worlds, and give this show a unique atmosphere. I gave the dub a brief try, and I’m glad that I watched the show through in Japanese first. This is an English dub from the bad old days, very perfunctory and not a lot of effort put in to creating characters or delivering a believable performance. Just five minutes made my teeth itch, and I had to turn it off.

Extras

Both discs get animated menus, and while each of the episodes is presented as originally broadcast in Japan, they are followed by a 90 second white text on black, silent, English language credit reel.

The only extras are on disc 2, and amount to the textless credit sequences and trailers for Toradora, Arakawa Under The Bridge, and Bodacious Space Pirates. At the time of writing only the latter is available in the UK from MVM. Judging by the trailers, it would be nice if the first two titles could one day be released here as well.

Conclusion

It’s surprising that there isn’t a lot more anime out there like this. After all, animation allows the imagination of the creator to run riot, with hardly as much concern about budget as there would be in an equivalent live action show. And what could be a greater expression of imaginative creativity than an anime about dreams? But as far as I can recall, this is the first anime series about dreams that I have come across. With over a hundred anime titles watched, it becomes clear that not everyone is willing to take on this subject. Of course the greater imagination implied by a show about dreams is a problem in itself, and the likelihood is that no imaginative vision put together by an animation committee or manga creator could ever live up to the possibilities that dreams offer. The fear would be that whatever vision put forth on screen would always fall short. Of course Satoshi Kon made Paprika, an anime movie about dreams, but that is Satoshi Kon, and 90 minutes of an animated feature film is one thing, five hours of a television series is a whole other matter. Dream Eater Merry is no Paprika, but it might just be Paprika’s kid brother.


Dream Eater Merry blends the mundane with the fantastic; it takes a well-used anime trope, a cast of familiar and comfortable characters, and dresses it in the fantastic and bizarre. The results smack a little of style without substance, and once in a while you can see the familiar story structure peeking from behind the show’s exhilarating visual facade. The structure will be familiar if you’ve seen shows like Shana, Shikabane Hime, and Buso Renkin. A fantasy, magical girl with supernatural abilities appears in a somewhat normal and unassuming teen male’s life, and he gets drawn into her world of battling strange monsters and paranormal villains, and on the way discovers he has hidden abilities of his own. It’s that same story wheeled out again for Dream Eater Merry, with Merry the dream demon made corporeal in the real world, looking for a way back to her own, and Yumeji the teenage boy that can sense other people’s dream auras.


Where Dream Eater Merry really stands out is in the quality of the animation, the music soundtrack that accompanies its fantastic visuals, and the degree of thought put into creating the rules of its particular universe. It doesn’t have the heavy jargon of something like Shana, but the way that its world is set up, with dream demons wanting to escape from the dream world, entering the real world by taking dreamer’s bodies as vessels, is an intriguing concept. No explanation is really given for why Merry is corporeal in the real world rather than taking a vessel, she has no recollection of how she even got there, but she’s also different in that she wants to get back. By finding dream demons trying to enter the real world, she becomes something of a hero in stopping them, even if it is only to try and follow them back to where she sends them. While she has a hard time figuring out where the next dream demon will appear, when Yumeji appears with his ability to read auras, it seems like a perfect fit.


Merry’s amnesia does cause complications though, when it becomes apparent that the way that the dream world works, the relationship between dream demons and their vessels isn’t as straightforward as she first thought. It causes her to doubt herself, and become somewhat depressed as a result, and it’s up to Yumeji to support her and also find the inner reserves in himself to help her in her quest. This is the strongest character dynamic in the show, and a very compelling reason to watch. The central character pairing is complex, well written and effectively portrayed, at least in the Japanese version.


Dream Eater Merry isn’t without its weaknesses though. Thirteen episodes really aren’t enough to develop this world and its characters, and something has to give. In this case it’s the supporting cast, especially those characters that flit in and out of the narrative only as dreamers that need saving from demons, and then fade to the background of the story once more. Yumeji’s friends Saki and Takateru really feel like comic relief, but have enough of a dynamic between them to make it feel like a disappointment that their story isn’t explored more. Also the villains of the piece, Mistltein and Pharos Heracles come across as a little one-dimensional, and the consequences and motives of their actions are never truly explained. Dream Eater Merry is very obviously a show hanging on for a sequel, and its open ending, and the way it fails to explore its villains are telling examples.


Dream Eater Merry also has something of a mid season slump. It’s a fantastic show about dreams and supernatural creatures from the darkest depths of the human psyche, and it still wastes an episode that could have been spent on character and narrative, on a swimsuit episode. We get some egregious fan service that sees the female cast of the show in bikinis, to get the ratings up and sell some figurines. After a really strong start, and a refreshing lack of fan service in the early episodes, this is doubly a disappointment, and it leaves a faint sour taste in the mouth, and an ennui that lingers into the next few episodes, even though we have at this point returned to the narrative and are building up to the finale.


Fortunately Dream Eater Merry delivers a peach of a conclusion, an action packed finale that really satisfies. While it leaves a lot of questions hanging about its story and its characters, it builds up the narrative to its conclusion sufficiently, introducing and developing the villains just enough, outlining the stakes, and testing its protagonists in such a way that you get wholly invested in how it turns out. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a fist pumping conclusion to an anime, but Dream Eater Merry truly has one, and you don’t even feel let down by a story that is left hanging, as it finishes in a spot that does underline what the show is about.


Dream Eater Merry isn’t perfect, it has its deficiencies in terms of narrative, and in the way that it is structured, and the fact that beneath the very attractive bodywork chugs an engine with a whole lot of mileage on it. But this is one show where it doesn’t hurt that the style outweighs the substance. The style is the whole reason to watch Dream Eater Merry.