It feels familiar to talk about 18if because I already spend most of my time talking about experimental shorts, pieces that riff off a central narrative to express the director's idiosyncrasies and style. Of course 18if isn't a basement project or a short film slated to be on the film festival circuit; it's a full-length primetime Gonzo show, with 24 minute episodes and licensed by Funimation in the West. But when Morimoto Kouji shows up to bat you can expect that things might be a little bit weird, and certainly the dream worlds of 18if are plenty weird. But the show goes beyond that; every episode has a different director handling the visual style and flow, and with the stories being episodic until the conclusion it's more like an omnibus that happens to share characters and some minor continuity, similar to the Visions of Frank homage to Jim Woodring but broadcast Fridays at 10. And the directors use that chance to experiment to the fullest; in a dream world, they can let their imagination go crazy.
The basic facts remain the same. Tsukishiro Haruto is stuck in a bedroom in a dream world, denoted by the edges of the screen looking like a black-and-purple Dali painting. He finds himself jumping into the dreams of women put to sleep in what is referred to as “Sleeping Beauty Syndrome”, but what quickly reveals to us to be an escape from the stress of the real world. And if Haruto is the typical white knight teenage male galavanting through the dream worlds, healing the girls' “witch” avatar with his manly posturing and sidekicks like a professor with a cat avatar or a white-haired girl who no one else can see, then many of the stresses are anything but typical. A deaf singer, a woman suffering from bulimia, even a girl whose trio of friends was cut down when one of the two boys executed the other for high treason; for every episode about first love or idols, there was one that dug shockingly deep into the pressures of life that anime rarely talks about. The trajectory and resolution were often the same, but the depictions were unpredictable and often striking, belying Haruto's more static character and the typical story.
Or maybe it's unfair to even call Haruto too typical a protagonist, rather than just impossible to read. The first episode he spends a bit confused and a bit exasperated, but ultimately pulls out some nonsense advice that cures her in three seconds flat. Cut to the second episode and he genuinely advises the next witch to kill three people in the real world if it'll make her feel better, purposefully shrugging off advice from his allies and helping her commit bloody murder. He dates more than a few girls to show them what love is, but he also suspends his mission for the sake of getting to dress up like an idol and do the dances, or stands by as a knitted 3D world is brought to an end by a falling satellite and left as an empty field of guillotines. It's an inconsistency born of both the variety of stories, combined with the fact that a dozen different people were telling them.
But even the lesser episodes have a mystique about them, set in a malleable dream world where the rules and the pacing are a complete mystery. No episode was slow or uneventful; the low points of the show were when it felt like Haruto didn't do enough to warrant healing their hearts, not in the presentation of the hearts broken. The opening episode had this issue, but it also had a chase sequence featuring painted shots Dezaki Osamu himself could've drawn. The third episode was a bland story about puppy love, but the montage of a summer festival had a perfect ephemerality to it courtesy of the lighting, the sound design from the ever-amazing Tsuruoka Youta, and simple shots timed to Claire de Lune. Morimoto's episode was weird and didn't make sense, but even with his trademark low-detail character designs the background sets and shot framing was everything we'd expect from the head of Studio 4°C, an enthralling look at a different world.
And say nothing of the episodes where everything clicked. Koichi Chigira's midseason episode was a mind-boggling exercise in style, completely shifting away from the avatars of Haruto and his allies that we're used to for a journey through time and space. They visit four different worlds with a young boy in the episode, each marked with one of the four key emotions: joy, anger, happiness, and sadness. And those emotions aren't overplayed, nor do they fully make sense until the last act, when we finally meet the witch Haruto would've usually met right at the start. The episode right after is equally harrowing, symbolizing sound through colors and mixing it with heavy emotional swings, floating words, and the story of experiencing life with deafness. Other stories, like the curry restaurant daughter who suffers from stress about overeating, are so subtly done it's hard to figure out exactly where they went wrong or found their way back, not that they have anything less to say.
It all ends with a crazy jump back to the real world, involving cults and the Garden of Eden, yet winding down with a teatime conversation and a dream within a dream. An odd reversal of the resolutions for the rest of the show was how little Haruto ultimately played into the show's final act, despite being at the center of the mystery. He provides a couple kisses on unwilling girls to break their spells in what shapes up to be a really creepy and misogynistic finale, but then he takes a backseat as a dozen girls sit in a circle and talk about female empowerment over tea and cookies, and suddenly we blink and it's over, with a resolution but possibly not a solution. It's bizarrely unlike the rest of the show, even though it took all the work of the early episodes to set the whole thing up, and it's bizarrely unlike almost any last episode I've seen in years. I'm still working out my feelings on the finale and the whole affair, but I'm definitely going to hold onto the show and bust out the episodes in case I want to think about its take on variations on a theme, somewhere in between the big business that produced it and the dozens of independent auteurs who may one day get a chance to participate in an 18if together.