I Had a Dream of That Girl (2020)

An Uneven Anthology Series

Ano ko no Yume wo Mitan Desu is an anthology series based on a book of fantasy short stories written by manzai comic and tarento Yamasato Ryota who is best known to international viewers as the cynical panelist on the reality show Terrace House. The framework for each episode of this series has a young, pre-fame Yamasato in a coffee shop where he gets annoyed by a customer or a staff member of the shop and escapes by writing a fantasy short story in his notebook. Each short story contains a self-insert character of Yamasato and centers around a different woman conveniently sharing a name with the actress who plays the character that week.

The stories cover a number of geeky sci fi and fantasy tropes including fantasy rpgs and Star Wars (Ep. 11 features a an opening title crawl). The tone is intended to be comedic throughout and mostly the humor lands. There is no substantive through-line across the episodes and so feel free to dip in and out of this series based on any stories that strike your fancy. Some of the episodes are entirely too ambitious for the show's budget and 30 minute run-time. In particular, ep. 11 is made largely incoherent by trying to squeeze in Star Wars parody, a tragic back-story and the main plot.

Yamasato overly idealizes the women who center these stories, and he portrays himself in the stories fairly consistently as cynical, dark and an outcast from the popular people. The twist in several of the stories is that sometimes his powers for evil result in good things happening, but just as often his character receives a comeuppance. The only episode I can recommend unreservedly is ep. 10 which has a sweet denouement, but most of the rest are worth watching as well.

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