Disney Twisted-Wonderland The Animation

Episode 2

What I would have given to be a fly on the wall in the room where Japanese phone game marketing executives were tasked with convincing the Walt Disney Corporation to hand over the rights to a century of beloved children's content for use in a hot guy gacha game. Now that the Disney Twisted Wonderland game basically prints money (it earns north of $4M per month globally), I imagine it was far less of a hard sell to convince Disney the anime was a good idea. Even so, I am surprised by how permissive the Mouse seems to have been. In “A Dismissive Ranking,” decades of Disney archives were on display with a walk down memory lane through seven of the franchise's most iconic villains. It's the centerpiece of an episode that otherwise exists to mobilize the plot, sticking true to the gacha game's storyline.

Yuken, we're really in it now. It doesn't matter if Yuken, Crowley, the other students, and even the Magic Mirror are all in agreement that Yuken doesn't belong here. Nobody's even heard of Japan, and all the magic in the realm isn't enough to send him back home. Instead Yu (as fellow students Ace and Deuce have recently dubbed him) has been damned to Ramshackle Dorm, a ruin held together with eldritch spirits and duct tape. Yu has that predictable protagonist energy that allows him to instantly befriend these ghosts, though of course it'd be tough to get scared by such jolly designs, so classic I wondered if they're from a forgotten Disney IP (they aren't).

Yu can't use magic, so instead he must earn his keep through menial chores, like scrubbing the statues of the school's seven idols until they shine. Those idols will seem very familiar to viewers, but Ace and Deuce's descriptions of the people we interpret as villains are decidedly whitewashed. The Queen “did whatever it took to maintain her position as the most beautiful" the boys recite, without mentioning that one of the things she did was poisoning an innocent girl. In this way, Night Raven College is exactly like an Ivy League because it's covered with statues of revered historical figures that, under the slightest bit of scrutiny, are actually awful. This rose-colored recollection is accompanied by actual archive footage of the baddies doing their baddest deeds, just in case there was any confusion. I also took note that Yu is from a version of modern-day Japan that seemingly has no Tokyo DisneySea or anything else for that matter, since he's never heard of Ursula, Maleficent, and the rest.

All in all, right in the middle of a row of important landmarks ranks among the worst possible locations to have a magical duel. What's going to become of Yu and Grim has already been signaled with a giant neon sign. Yuken has been chosen by the Black Carriage but can't do magic. Grim hasn't been chosen, but he can. Of course, for this dynamic duo to enroll in the academy, first Yuken is going to need to avoid getting expelled after that ill-located duel. Crowley gives the gang another chance, which means going on a fetchquest to a creepy old mine. It's at times like this that the anime's phone game origins show the most obviously—when it's not a narrative so much as a series of quests and objectives.

The post-credits sequence shows the boys getting situated in the dorms, offering personality and color to a larger-than-average cast of characters, most of whom we've barely even met. Considering this is all being packed into a shorter-than-usual 8-episode series, we could use all the characterization we can get. The pieces are all in place for rules stickler Riddle to become Yu's first adversary (just like in the game), but the show is going to have to hustle in order to progress through the other five.

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Disney Twisted-Wonderland The Animation is currently streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.

Lauren is a freelance journalist with a focus on anime fandom. Both of her kids are named after Gundam characters.