Ranked #5077

Heart no Kuni no Alice: Wonderful Wonder World

I am a big fan of just about anything Alice in Wonderland related. I throughly enjoyed reading the Heart no Kuni no Alice magna, and was very excited to watch the movie adaptation. However, I was throughly disappointed.

There is essentially no plot whatsoever throughout the course of this film. The scenes jump quickly and offer little explanation to the events going on. There is also absolutely no character development, so if someone unfamiliar with the series were to watch, they would be utterly lost.

Also, the film wastes a lot of time on pointless scenes. For example, in the opening, they continually showed cards turning over on themselves, or in one particular scene, characters were in an elevator for ten minutes with little to no dialogue between them. Although these scenes may have been an attempt at artistic effect, they fell flat, particularly considering the rushed nature of the film (the pointless scenes easily could have been replaced with more plot-filled ones).

The art itself was quite nice, but cheesy music and cut scenes (such as the changing from day to night) ruined this for me slightly.

Overall, I did not find the Heart no Kuni no Alice film enjoyable to watch. Although it had a lot of potential, it did not deliver. read more

Heart no Kuni no Alice or Alice in the Country of Hearts originally began as a
series of Otomegames, a manga and most recently the movie this rewiew covers.

As you already might or might not have guessed, the source material of the story is Lewis Carroll´s famous novel Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland, a fact which is rather unimportant as the shared points can be counted with one hand.

But now to the actual movie and be warned [SPOILERS AHEAD].

It starts out with Alice (obviously) getting thrown into wonderland, but that´s
where the flick decides that a chronological approach of telling the story is way to simple and starts switching back and forth in the timeline via transitions that leave people who don´t know the general story already dumbfounded.

After this mess the viewer is finally given some exposition (15 MINUTES ALREADY WASTED!)Where we´re shown the most important fractions and the people behind it, well at least parts of it as THIS MOVIE DOESN´T EXPLAIN THAT 3 Of 4 FRACTIONS ARE SWORN ENEMIES AND THE 4. ( = the clocktower) IS NEUTRAL.
Furthermore manages to completely omit the relation between the cast which gets most obvious further into the flick as they then try to relate the Queen to the Hatter which is of course done badly which then RENDERS ANOTHER PART OF THE MOVIE MEANINGLESS.

But there are more issues:

As this originally was an otomegame, Alice could basically have a reversed harem, but in this movie some men outright tell her to get lost which makes her internal struggle of leaving Wonderland and staying there pointless.

At some points this flick actually manages to waste time!
The elevator sequences are way to long and, aside from some plot, just show how characters change the level they are currently on.

Somehow was the manga way better. It wasn´t that inconsistant.

[Funfact: This was supposed to be a OVA, which makes me wonder how messed up that would have been]

To sum it up:

- the visuals are okay but seem outdated
- the manga was way, way better and you should read it instead
- it is totally confusing for newcommers, (and everyone else)

+ all-star cast of Seiyuu, as you have probably heard all of them at some point read more