100 Sleeping Princes and the Kingdom of Dreams Episode 4: Not All Dreams Are Good Ones

Despite the Disney like fairy tale narrative being spun here, episode 4 kind of shows us the darker side of the dream land with pirates, mermaids, death at sea, and a past that seems determined to resurface.

No surprise that I started getting a little concerned as soon as I realised they were about to get on a ship because it seemed very likely our nameless heroine would get swept overboard at some point. Fortunately this anime has so far shown that danger is fairly swiftly overcome so I wasn’t too worried about an actual drowning. The closest we really get to it this episode is a reference to the flowers around the ship being there in memory of those who have died at sea. It’s about as tame as a fairy tale can get while still claiming a slightly darker edge.

Kihel’s story continues to develop and while the whole amnesia with flashes of memory thing has been done to death, in the context of this show it kind of works. What works less well is that fact that other than Avi, none of the other Princes appear to actually be trapped inside rings so I’m not entirely sure why the Princess is needed at all here or why that was a thing in the first place. The rings were super important for all of one episode and now they aren’t even mentioned. It kind of breaks the overall world building going on here.

That said the Princes we meet this week are an interesting group, whether human or not. Plus we ended on a fairly dramatic cliff-hanger once again so we’ll get to spend more time with them next week and hopefully have a bit of fun.

They have gone to a lot of effort to not name the heroine though. At one point she was asked point blank who she was and before she could speak Navi jumped in and said she was the Princess of wherever. After that, all the characters she met just happily called her Princess and seemed to forget even caring what her name was. Despite the fact that almost all the other characters are Princes of somewhere but still have a name. It’s a little bit weird, though kind of shows the source loud and clear.

Previous Reviews:

Thanks for reading.

Karandi James