At first the Chinese title of this series, which reads roughly as "a grand system of four-and-a-half-mat myths", meant nothing to me. I took it for some throwaway short anime about a school full of assorted gods, the kind you finish while your instant noodles cook. I only saved it because of its high Douban score, and it was who knows how many years before I finally picked it up.
The story of The Tatami Galaxy is actually simple. A good-for-nothing college student lives countless failed lives in countless parallel worlds, until one of him gains the power to cross all of them, breaks through himself at last, grows up and wins at life. Told like that, it sounds so long in the tooth that it has no teeth left for a pretty dentist to look after (runs away). Yet it turned out, unexpectedly, to be the most interesting thing I had watched in a long time.
Being lazy, I'm just posting an outline I wrote three months ago (I'm doomed):
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Worldview: magical realism
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Values: very sound. Let go of the rose-colored fantasy, and seize the chance that lies in every color
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Structure: the same motif played over and over, variation within repetition, a musical quality, an intricate structure full of echoes (the colors). Compare Endless Eight and Cloud Atlas. Episode 10 steps up a dimension and lays the OP and ED bare; episode 11 steps back down for a complete ending. The old fortune-teller carries an implied higher dimension (a meta that doesn't play mysterious: as viewers we already know, so there is no need to hide it). Episode 10 lifts the hero's point of view to a higher dimension (the author stood in that higher dimension from the start, which is how the details and images that quietly answer each other across episodes could be planted). Episode 11 steps back down.
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Images and plot points that keep coming back: the four-and-a-half-mat room, moths, the bear, ramen, the old woman, the "cowboy" Johnny. Alike each time, yet different
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Characters: their depth is filled in by fragments from different worlds. A quick-tongued chatterbox
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Editing: very fast cutting and style switches, very fast dialogue, higher information density, short fragments repeated until they leave a strong impression
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Score: very theatrical. Michiru Ōshima, formally trained. Strings
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English title: The Tatami Galaxy, a universe in a few square feet (for the last "me", for the viewer who watched from start to finish, for the people who made the series). The relation between the finite and the infinite
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Robert McKee, Story: "All fine stories take place in a finite, knowable world. The world of a story must be small enough that a single artist's mind can hold the fictional universe it creates, and know everything in it the way God knows the world he made."
Douban: The Tatami Galaxy