Forum - View topicAlice in Anime Wonderland
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Sahmbahdeh
Posts: 712 |
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Man, there's a lot of Alice. Japan's relationship with Alice in Wonderland approaches their level of obsession with Oda Nobunaga, it seems. Anyway, in addition to a lot of the ones mentioned here, I tend to think of the Code Geass OVA Nunnally in Wonderland, when I think of shoehorned-in Alice tropes.
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SaharaFrost
 Posts: 95 |
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Here's a few more:
Serial Experiments Lain Deadman Wonderland Kyousogiga I think both Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro could also be said to have underlying themes inspired by Alice in Wonderland. Also, back in the 90s, it seemed that every anime had at least one Wonderland-inspired episode. Anything by CLAMP especially. But even shows like Slayers would have a random Alice in Wonderland "filler" episode. |
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CorneredAngel
 Posts: 854 Location: New York, NY |
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Amanda Kennell (University of Southern California) is actually working on her dissertation on basically this specific topic - how Japan has been adapting the Alice novels from the 1980's to now. Hopefully, she'll have it done next year, and published as a book soon after!
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Suena
Posts: 289 |
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I became a big "Alice" nerd as a kid after someone gave me a huge footnoted edition. So of course I love anything with references!
I think Pandora Hearts is my favorite, just for the sheer number of references (even though the plot has nothing to do with it). It also slips in little quotes that you'd probably only recognize if you were fairly familiar with the original books (especially as they weren't translated exactly the same into English; I don't know if it's because they were re-worded in Japanese, or the translator didn't know the reference). |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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I liked the recent Alice adaptation for Queen's Blade Grimoire.
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Reading Alice from the original Carroll is like the way we just didn't get Monty Python when it first hit the US in the early British-Comedy-Invasion 70's--It was funny, but the English social satire of why they were talking about dead birds or Parliament ministers were walking funny just flew miles over our heads, and we thought, "huhuh, wonder what those guys are on". Later, we realized there was a sarcastic point to all the jokes, and it was funnier. After the recent spawn of the '10 Tim Burton movie, it reminds us what can happen when a screenwriter Doesn't Get the Jokes in the Alice books--Either he tries to make up his own and makes an obnoxious fool of himself (or herself, in the case of Linda Woolverton), or play it straight, don't quite understand it themselves, and shrug "Hey, she's dreaming or crazy, it's SUPPOSED to be weird!" In the Caterpillar scene, people who don't get the reason why Alice recites a very wrong version of "You are old, Father William" (Carroll didn't have any other place to put pointedly silly Victorian-poetry parodies), just look at the setting and say "Huhuh, shroooooms...Hey, how's that pipe-smoke, Caterpillar?....  "
(And while Disney's '51 animated version, despite all their liberties, at least got many of the jokes as they were intended, I just now on Amazon found a gray-market color-restored widescreen disk of that gorgeous-looking 1971 British version that was 99% text-faithful to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Alices-Adventures-Wonderland-1972-version/dp/B01A64DV6O/ The other versions of the '71 movie, including the ones streaming on Amazon Prime, tend to be very, very, very public-domain.)
That seems to be the two main misinterpretations Japanese have: A), they see a girl having civilized English tea in a ploofy Victorian dress and hair-ribbon, and it either represents the Foreign Western Elegance they model their Victorian coffeehouses around, or it's the "good little girl" model for Loli-Goth fashion to deconstruct, or B ), they think she has some power to do all the magical things herself, which makes it an easy trope for the Magical Girl, while still keeping the myth of Western fashion. Basically, Alice isn't doing all the magic things "herself"--She's running into all the magically-booby-trapped aspects of Wonderland, and a constant confusion of magical things are happening TO her. She's supposed to be the normal one. Oh, and Burton generation aside, the ahem, Queen of Hearts (the "Red Queen" was in Looking Glass) wasn't a "wicked queen" for Alice to "defeat"--to bring peace to the kingdom, you were about to say? The Queen is frustrating, tyrannical and silly, but basically ignored. As the Griffin says, "It's all her fancy that, they never executes nobody." Unlike the Disney animated, Alice wasn't even the one on trial, although she does get into trouble for being too precocious with her sensible little-Victorian-girl mouth. |
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5120 |
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I really must read those Annotated Alice books!
So many books, so little time..... |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4469 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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It's only an ending animation, but Dagashi Kashi's Alice-in-Wonderland-themed ED, "Hey Calorie Queen!" with Saya Endo as Alice lost in Hotaru Shidare's candy Wonderland was superb.
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11348 |
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There were some subtle Alice references in episode 10 of Joker Game.
Also a 3 episode OVA of Alice in Borderland, which would probably be in the violent-Alice category. I don't recall many overt references beyond the title and trapped in an alternate world setting though. I suppose my favorite would have to be the Wonderland OVAs in Black Butler. The characters are really perfect for it. |
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Jedi Master Kirito
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This is a timely article, for I had been wondering why it is that Japan seems so fascinated by Alice. Cardcaptor Sakura, Black Butler, and Code Geass are just a few of the anime I have seen which adapt Alice.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/98e970d6c7207b693e84b8a0d1a98c619d39bcea1330ea614bfab5f997c4ec09.png [Edit]: changed your large image to a link. If you can use a smaller image, by all means change it back. Errinundra. |
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enurtsol
 Posts: 14761 |
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I swear, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is the only Western book Japan has ever known.
(They probably have already forgotten even Shakespeare.) It's like what's Voltron to the West. 
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Oh no, Peter Pan and Cinderella are heavily flogged, too--Yeah, maybe a FEW Cinderella refs in anime. Basically, "Any Western story Disney did a movie of." |
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Roger Pepitone
Posts: 26 |
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I thought it was Anne of Green Gables.
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Princess_Irene
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 2606 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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This is probably the misconception that annoys me the most, although I restrained myself from putting it in the article, hoping it would come up in the forum. (Thanks, EricJ2!) As far as I can tell, the "wicked queen" issue dates to the Disney film while the tendency to turn the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen into a single person is more of an "American McGee's Alice"-spawned problem. There may be an earlier instance of this happening, but that's the one that seems to have popularized the misconception. |
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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That's another one that turns up in anime sometimes too (as in the World Masterpiece Theater adaptation of the novel, or the recent character of "Lucy" in Bungo Stray Dogs), but it's much less prevalent than Alice references. Other ones I thought of the Alice in Borderland OVA and Manga, as Gina mentioned Shugo Chara (another Peach Pit series) has a splash panel in the manga where Amu's holding an "eat me" cake and a "drink me" bottle while Ikuto's up in a tree Kiddy Grade (has several characters named after people from literature and mythology, including a pair of twins named Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and they fly a spaceship named the Cheshire Cat) Love Live (for the performance of Korekara no Someday in S1E6, the girls are wearing costumes inspired by Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the Dormouse) More broadly, I wonder sometimes whether the entire "transported to an alternate world" genre itself owes some small debt to Alice, since it was one of (if not the) first examples of such a story in literature and remains arguably the most famous worldwide. |
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