Maybe you've had the experience of waking in the early morning, turning on the TV, hopping channels, and stumbling on a kids' fantasy cartoon that you've not seen before; not a TV episode but a stand-alone cartoon special or film. Honestly, it's not a great cartoon in terms of its story, characters or design. But the whimsical antics have some energy, there are a few neat ideas and jokes, and you watch it for a while, perhaps to the end.

The P.A. Works film Alice in Wonderland: Dive in Wonderland (Fushigi no Kuni de Alice to -Dive in Wonderland-) is a cartoon on that level. If you watched it randomly on TV, you might find it a pleasant discovery, assuming you have some fondness for children's fantasy cartoons. However, I'm reviewing the film while it's on its current limited cinema run in the UK, playing subbed-only, distributed by the French streaming platform Animation Digital Network (ADN).

Is it worth a trip to the cinema and the ticket price? Not unless you have a specific interest in fantasy animation, or in reinterpretations of Lewis Carroll's Alice. The film has moments that are charming or amusing, but it's often fairly dull. For much of the film's length, the target audience seems to be preteens, some of whom might be enthralled, though they may be deterred by the subtitles.

It's a modernized reworking of Carroll's books – most scenes are recognizable from Carroll, but re-spun for an Instagram generation, so that now the heroine chases the White Rabbit because the critter took her phone. This heroine isn't Alice but Lise, a young Japanese woman taking a break from job-hunting to visit a project created by her recently-deceased grandmother. This granny loved Alice and created a theme park in the Japanese countryside to celebrate the books. That much is believable – I've visited a Peter Rabbit café in the shadow of Mount Fuji.

Arriving at the park, Lise learns it's a VR affair. Actually, the suggestion is that it's Augmented Reality via smart glasses, but that gets forgotten once Lise chases the White Rabbit down his hole. At the bottom, Lise meets Carroll's Alice, an adorable little girl who's vaguely true to the books, but with a much merrier disposition. And so Lise and Alice's adventures begin, with cats and caterpillars and tea parties and floods of tears, and a fearsome queen who demands heads roll.

Alice has been reworked endlessly for more than a century, and this take is rarely inspired. One of the characters' first encounters is with Alice's languidly lounging caterpillar, envisioned here as an influencer obsessed with followers and moisturizing. If that's enough to make purists shudder, then watch out for a familiar pair of Carroll characters later on, who are reinterpreted as rap singers. Actually, the rap routine turns out to be rather good at expressing the film's moral, which is about the dangers of social conformity and how you shouldn't bury the quirks that make you you.

If only the Wonderland characters were more fun or appealing. By and large, they're mediocre cartoon figures, crying for a smidgen of the vividness of the original Alice characters. The White Rabbit is mildly interesting, presented as an obsessive multi-tasker barking out questions at Alice - it feels true to the books, where Alice was often interrogated in a similar way, The Cheshire Cat is well visualized in his suave purpleness, but as in the book he hasn't much to do. The child Alice is appealing because she enjoys her adventures tremendously, at least until she has a disaster-level tantrum. Her purpose is to contrast with Lise, being her inner child who can guide the less confident adult through her challenges.

The later challenges turn out to be the most inventive, with Lise undergoing transformations that are true to Carroll's spirit while going beyond his books. The film builds to a cartoony crescendo with a crowd of characters shouting and running madly about; it gives way to a coda that's the one poetic part of the film. I won't give away the details, but it's quiet and a bit scary in a child-appropriate way, before a last lesson is imparted to Lise by an old woman and a little girl who might be the same person.

Few of the film's dream visions stay in the mind after watching it and I was disappointed not to see more of the Japanese countryside from the opening scenes. The “flood of tears” scene, where Lise must get rid of the flood in a dangerous way, is lively but hardly exciting. Alice used to be made of stronger stuff in Japan. Catherine Butler's superb book, British Children's Literature in Japanese Culture: Wonderlands and Looking Glasses describes the first Japanese "translation" of Alice in 1899. It added figures such as a Japanese ogre who offers the girl a meal - a severed human arm. How about an anime of that Alice?