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Answerman - Why Is Alice In Wonderland So Popular In Japan?


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FLCLGainax





PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 5:45 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
But Alice in Wonderland was first published in Japanese in 1910 (a heavily adapted adaptation bearing the title Ai-chan no Yume Monogatari).

However, its follow-up book Through the Looking Glass, had an earlier Japanese publication in 1899 as Kagami Sekai―Seiyō Otogibanashi (鏡世界―西洋お伽噺). Source: Translations of Through the Looking-Glass and the Japanese Wikipedia page (towards the bottom under 日本語訳 ).
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jdnation



Joined: 15 May 2007
Posts: 1993
PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 6:10 pm Reply with quote
Could be something as simple as it being one of those 'classics' that are part of assigned reading/viewing for kids in schools.

Also the story concepts make for fun colouring books.

So everyone through such things becomes familiar with it.

But Alice does seem to have a far more persuasive longevity, and its themes and wonder are timeless.
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FMPhoenixHawk



Joined: 21 Dec 2007
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Location: Formerly MI, now IN.
PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 7:08 pm Reply with quote
I'm going to go with drugs. Yeah, since the entire thing is (likely) a massive drug trip, I'm going that way.

And the frilly dresses.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 8:02 pm Reply with quote
FMPhoenixHawk wrote:
I'm going to go with drugs. Yeah, since the entire thing is (likely) a massive drug trip, I'm going that way.
And the frilly dresses.


Lewis Carroll's humor is literally like when Monty Python first arrived in America in the early 70's:
Americans couldn't make head or tail of dry absurdist Britcom satire, didn't know why someone was talking about dead parrots, coconut-laden swallows or walking funny, and thought "Huhuh, they must be on druuuuugs, dood!" Actually, the Pythons themselves claimed they were just rich, sheltered Oxford kids from the Variety-stage club, and that songwriter Neil Innes seemed like the "cool hippie" because he had a band.
Which brings us back to Lewis Carroll's shy, sheltered Oxford/Cambridge existence, where bad puns, silly parodies of soppy Victorian poetry, and nonsense jokes about logic were hysterically funny. Most of which, as pointed out, don't translate into Japanese.

(In the scene where the Mad Hatter and March Hare start making up a story about "Three girls who lived in a well" and Alice keeps interrupting with questions, Caroll experts believe we're hearing an actual story Caroll ad-libbed to amuse the three Liddell sisters, on one of their Thames boating picnics to an actual historic well site.
"And their names were Elsie, Lacie and Tillie" just happen to have been the three sisters' real nicknames...Guess which one was "Lacie".)

Justin wrote:
Outside of the world of anime, the imagery is still pervasive in Japan. A chain of themed restaurants, known as Alice's Fantasy Restaurant, offers tea party themed dishes and some very cool decor. They have five locations around Tokyo.


That's pretty much it, in a nutshell:
To the Japanese, Western/European Elegance is Victorian-English, which means sipping tea in frilly dresses.
The fascination with Alice could just as well be for any other Victorian novel on World Masterpiece Theater, like "The Secret Garden" or "Pollyanna", except for the two obvious Japanese appeals:

1) A cat follows Alice, for some reason (oh, the Japanese and their cats... Anime catgrin ), and
2) Magical things seem to keep unexpectedly happening to her. But for some odd reason, the Japanese think Alice has suddenly developed magic powers and is causing cookies and tea to become magic by herself--How many paranormal-action series about kids or teens with psychic powers have we since had where our characters had, quote, "developed an Alice"?

Oh, and the Disney animated movie, of course. Can't forget that.
How many Alice adaptations have we seen in anime where Alice meets a talking doorknob on the locked door, despite the fact that that Walt made that up and that was never even in the original book?


Last edited by EricJ2 on Wed Feb 20, 2019 8:40 pm; edited 1 time in total
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Siegfriedl88



Joined: 22 Jun 2017
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PostPosted: Wed Feb 20, 2019 8:02 pm Reply with quote
FMPhoenixHawk wrote:
I'm going to go with drugs. Yeah, since the entire thing is (likely) a massive drug trip, I'm going that way.

And the frilly dresses.


yeaa exactly! but much like with watching the yellow submarine, I felt this would of been so much better if i was on some sort of drug at the time.

interesting enough I'm going back through Persona Q(refreshing myself for Persona Q2) and the 1st dungeon is called you in wonderland :p
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enurtsol



Joined: 01 May 2007
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 2:39 am Reply with quote
Japan loves them Alices and Gothic Lolitas Laughing

Incidentally about Lewis Carroll (real name: Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson):

"Lewis Carroll’s Shifting Reputation - Why has popular opinion of the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland undergone such a dramatic reversal?"

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/lewis-carrolls-shifting-reputation-9432378/

Alice at age 6



And at 20

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CorneredAngel



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PostPosted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 4:48 am Reply with quote
Amanda Kennell, who currently teaches in the Asian Studies program at SUNY-Buffalo, has been researching this exact question for quite a while now. And her book on it, under the title "Alice in Evasion: Adapting Lewis Carroll in Japan", is due to be published hopefully later this year.

For background/additional information on Prof. Kennell, see this write-up:



https://asianstudies.buffalo.edu/asian-studies-welcomes-new-faculty-member-amanda-kennell
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Scalfin



Joined: 18 May 2008
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 2:44 pm Reply with quote
Siegfriedl88 wrote:
surprised you didn't mention Sword art online, since the whole Alicaztion arc has constant references too Alice in wonderland, not too mention Alice herself.

yea i dont get the appeal ,i watched the disney movie a long time ago and i was left confused with what the plot actually was...maybe that was given my age when i saw it , but its still the most convoluted story I've ever saw


The Disney version is aggressively simple: Alice goes on screed about how the world would work were she in charge and making the rules, Alice gets lured into world in which her rules are in effect, Alice discovers that she's not the one in charge and that her rules make it very bad to be in that position, Alice wakes up from dream with newfound knowledge that the rules of the real world aren't so bad after all.
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katriniac



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PostPosted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 4:18 pm Reply with quote
I've been looking into this for a while, because it always intrigued me that Alice and Cinderella are two of the most common titles to pop up again and again. My thoughts on this will be kind of all over the place because I don't have my notes with me, but here goes:
It has to do with the timing of the World War II and the Disney theatrical releases in Japan. Even though the book was translated in 1910, there had never been any major play or film devoted to it in Japan.

The Japanese forces surrendered in 1945 at the end of World War II. Walt Disney was a very shrewd businessman and he knew that a country that lost in a war will be hungry for family entertainment. He saw that Japan was ready for tourism and commercialism. Snow White had had some good success when it was released in 1937 in the US. The next few (Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi) were slightly less well-received in the box office. So he went back to the princess genre for the next one: Cinderella. And waiting in the wings was Alice in Wonderland one year later.

In 1950, Disney released Snow White in Japan. Following immediately after that was Cinderella and Alice. Snow White was a testing ground, but they really did a lot to promote Cinderella and Alice when they were released in Japan.
Taking this into account along with the fact that Snow White has black hair (which little kids wouldn't be too impressed about and rarely think of Americans that way in the 1950s), it's no wonder that blonde-haired Cinderella and Alice captured their attention and held it for a long long time.

Children who were sitting in those theaters in the 1950s became the CEOs of anime and game studios in the 1990s. Their imaginations were emblazoned with the idea of being a rags-to-riches princess or a girl whisked off to a fantasy land. They brought their childhood fascination into the workplace and it took root in much of the media they created.

I believe it has continued to this day because of that first generation who saw the Disney movies and built up so much legend or mythos around it.

I find that part strange, because Japanese culture has such a rich history of literature that abounds with yokai and fantastical creatures. I don't know why they didn't find their own cultural folklore as exciting as that from the West. But I guess that's just the way kids and teens think of it: The grass is always greener in the other pasture. They probably found their own stories boring because they had heard them so many times. Whereas Cinderella and Alice were something new and shiny, and they had singing and dancing and big fluffy dresses with petticoats. What little girl wouldn't grow wide-eyed at that confection of Western culture?
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Spastic Minnow
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 21, 2019 8:33 pm Reply with quote
I'm no expert but it seems to me that Alice share certain sensibilities with Kenji Miyazawa's works too. The periods people here are mentioning as times when Alice starts to gain popularity barely post-date the rising popularity of Miyazawa after his death.

Fanciful children's tales that involve traveling to strange lands and the occasional talking animals. The "lessons" are quite different but maybe the more basic simplicity of the story is a plus for Japanese audience too.
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enurtsol



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PostPosted: Fri Feb 22, 2019 8:53 am Reply with quote
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 22, 2019 9:28 am Reply with quote
katriniac wrote:

I believe it has continued to this day because of that first generation who saw the Disney movies and built up so much legend or mythos around it.


I think that's a reasonable theory. The big question, however, is why is it specifically Alice that we see show up so often, while the other contemporary Disney content from the timeframe you discuss is far less prevalent?

For example: while I am sure they exist, I can't think of a single anime reference to Cinderella off the top of my head. The same applies to most Disney films from the timeframe you discuss: Pinocchio, Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, etc...but I can name many references to Alice. For some reason, Alice seems to stick out as being unusually influential.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 22, 2019 3:00 pm Reply with quote
AkumaChef wrote:
For example: while I am sure they exist, I can't think of a single anime reference to Cinderella off the top of my head. The same applies to most Disney films from the timeframe you discuss: Pinocchio, Snow White, Dumbo, Bambi, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, etc...but I can name many references to Alice. For some reason, Alice seems to stick out as being unusually influential.


Probably for the same reason references to Disney's version of Peter Pan (like the WMT series, or Wendy turning up in Urusei Yatsura) pop up frequently in anime--It's ENGLISH.

As for Snow White, apple and glass-coffin references are all over anime as the symbol of Western Fairytales (check out some of Tezuka's shameless Disney homages) although they often get blurred and merged with Maleficent imagery from Sleeping Beauty. It's often hard for Americans to tell those two Disney versions apart.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Fri Feb 22, 2019 11:33 pm Reply with quote
katriniac wrote:
I find that part strange, because Japanese culture has such a rich history of literature that abounds with yokai and fantastical creatures. I don't know why they didn't find their own cultural folklore as exciting as that from the West.

Maybe you just don't recognize it when you see it? There are probably at least as many adaptations and references to Urashima Tarou in anime as there are to Alice. Journey to the West, though Chinese, is not western, and likewise is constantly referenced and reused. You'll also find many references to other classics like Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Princess Kaguya) and Momotarou. And there are dozens of anime about traditional youkai, ayakashi, and kami and the people who deal with them.

Alice is definitely one of, if not the leading western literary influence, but she's hardly eclipsed Japan's own sources as inspiration for anime.
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AkumaChef



Joined: 10 Jan 2019
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 23, 2019 9:40 am Reply with quote
EricJ2 wrote:

Probably for the same reason references to Disney's version of Peter Pan (like the WMT series, or Wendy turning up in Urusei Yatsura) pop up frequently in anime--It's ENGLISH.


That's a very good point.

Quote:
As for Snow White, apple and glass-coffin references are all over anime as the symbol of Western Fairytales (check out some of Tezuka's shameless Disney homages) although they often get blurred and merged with Maleficent imagery from Sleeping Beauty. It's often hard for Americans to tell those two Disney versions apart.


I do recall seeing the apple references, but I'm not sure I consider those Disney references. Those feature in classic fairytales which pre-date Disney by a very long time. For example, we might talk about the Little Mermaid, but if you ask me that's not a Disney invention, that's Hans Christian Andersen. And even then he didn't invent the idea of mermaids, he just wrote one particular story. Tezuka certainly was known for what he copied and adapted from Disney, so I'm not saying that there were NO references to other Disney works. My point was that Alice references pop up disproportionately often compared to those from other Disney-associated works.


Last edited by AkumaChef on Sat Feb 23, 2019 9:50 am; edited 1 time in total
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