As I sit down to the English dub on the My Dear Marie DVD, or Metal Angel Marie for the VHS dubbed edition, I find myself saying the same thing over and over again every time I watch this show.  My Dear Marie is the epitome of cliché perfection.  A show that uses clichés so well that it gives a fresh feel to old material.

The three OVA episodes of My Dear Marie give such a variety of genres, plot lines, and feelings that it's truly amazing, especially since it delivers so well.  We have stories such as the nerd builds robot, robot living with the nerd, the bad-ass fighting story, the unlikely first-love romance, and the dream episode all pushed into three thirty minute episodes.  Then what is even more startling is the surprisingly fresh and hilarious lines, even though they are completely cliché.

Though I would normally not comment on the English dub, I have only watched the series in English.  The lines are delivered with excellent timing and their voices match well.  There are some rough spots in the second episode, but overall, I enjoy the English for one simple reason.  The dub shows just how funny the script is.

Lines like "I've got a pretty good idea...", "Just for that, you'll have to do it more than once...", "I was waiting for the bus in front of the house when the tall blind man next door walked by and dropped his wallet on the ground, right in front of me.  There was no money in it at all, yet I slipped it into my vest pocket and walked slowly away...", and "Hiroshi, can I buy this from you?" have stuck in my mind ever since I saw the show years ago.  And will continue to stick with me for years to come.  There is just something so perfect about the way these lines are delivered.

Character designs are on par and the animation is decent and does the job.  The director of Dirty Pair Flash and Princess Nine, Tomoni Mochizuki, truly flexes his skills in anime in terms of pacing, story construction, and engrossing an audience.  The series is so compact, but has such a flow that not a single part of an episode is useless, boring, or filler.  Mochizuki even pokes fun at the medium in the preview segments by having the chibi Marie bow her head so her mouth is obscured to say the episode title.  Of course, this is so the animators can reuse the animation for different title names.  However, it comes of as hilarious self-parody, since that animation never shows up again in the later two previews.

This brings me to the story.  The story of My Dear Marie is three different adventures in the lives of Marie Karigari, her creator, Hiroshi Karigari, and Marie Karigari’s model, the real Marie.  The three episodes are self-contained, but each the first two build upon each other to the climatic cerebral-voyage-dream episode.  It is within that episode that the characters are transcended into more than cliché and last in memory.

My Dear Marie wraps up thematically, but tastefully leaves some plot hanging.  This is a trait inherit to many great shows, and My Dear Marie's ending confirms that claim.  Not only does the last episode transcend the characters, but also sums up the show’s main theme perfectly: a theme that has been building so subtly, yet so powerfully that I was frankly amazed.

My Dear Marie is a short little piece of great anime.  So perfectly packed, so perfectly paced, and has such resonance that for what cliché it is, it is truly amazing.  "How can a warm-blooded human being understand the pain felt by inanimate object?"  I'm not sure, but My Dear Marie tries to explore that theme and the outcomes for the characters trapped in that theme.  Even though My Dear Marie is nothing but a laugh-out-loud, lighthearted comedy, it sticks to that theme so thoroughly that it became a masterpiece.