Fushigi no Kuni no Miyuki-chan

Picture one day in your life that you awaken only to find yourself in an unfamiliar world, and that ever character there wants a piece of you in a bizarre way! Well poor Miyuki seems to have the worst luck in the world, as everyday is that kinda day for her!

Miyuki-Chan in Wonderland is pretty much a unique take on the "Alice in Wonderland" story, only done by the all women Japanese team known as Clamp, only this time CLAMP does it their own way! This title contains two 15 minute OVAs. (Miyuki-can in Wonderland and Miyuki-chan in mirror land) Both are very similar in ... their concepts.

Story: 6/10
Its pretty straight forward, Miyuki wakes up for school one morning when she happens to come across a scantily clad female women dressed like a bunny, a giant hole appears beneath both and sucks them into a mysterious land, she then has to find a way to escape the mysterious world. Along the way she comes across a bizarre cast of suggestively dressed women, all who in fact want.....ahem......a piece of her! (Yeah its a Yuri title) A big majority of the cast from Alice and Wonderland are represented here, except this time they are all adult females. No matter what kinda situation Miyuki is in, she always seems to swiftly escape either on purpose or by accident. Which indecently is my only major complaint with this title, that’s pretty much all you see.....her escaping one after another! There is no more point to the OVA than that. Not to mention the only dialog we hear is Miyuki introducing herself, the Wonderland characters introducing themselves, then Miyuki escapes them! Wash rinse and repeat! The other half of the OVA (Mirror Land) is the exact same thing, only this time she is running from fairies and a clone of herself. But again, its the exact same thing as before...running....running.....and more running! The only thing that really distinct its from the first part, is that Miyuki gets sucked in by way of a mirror this time around.

As far as offensive material goes, it does contain many characters in tight reveling clothes, and it is a Yuri title. Not to mention there is a scene where Miyuki’s clone appears topless for a brief few seconds. So if that’s not your bag then don’t watch.

Art: 7/10
Being that its a 1996 title, it shows its age to be sure. The art with the character design itself is pretty good though, with colorful well detailed characters and clothing. It really is great in that aspect. The backgrounds themselves do leave a lot to be desired though, they are not detailed very well, and even the color........for an older title mind you, is lacking a lot in the artistic department. Still, the character design and style make up pretty well for that short comings of this.

Sound: 4/10
Miyuki-chan has a nice catchy jazz style theme that both has a high (saxophone and horns) and low (soft drum beat) parts to it, it is just great! So why the 4 then? IT’S THE ONLY TRACK YOU HEAR THE ENTIRE TIME! Seriously, it just loops and loops over and over again from beginning to end. Since it has the low point of the track playing most of the time, it makes you feel like your in an elevator. And if you are watching this while fatigued, it will most likely put you to sleep. While there is sadly no opening theme to this title, the closing one is alright, a nice light j-pop styled beat. Nothing special, but it fits for the ending scene.

Character: 5/10
Well honestly, the only character you really get to see is Miyuki herself, all other cast members are there for only a few seconds after she runs away from them. Miyuki herself is likable though, which is good since she takes up about 90% of the spotlight. Other than that there really isn’t much else to say, especially since there isn’t much in the way of over all dialog and conversation going through out. Nobody ever comes off as annoying so the titles is okay in that regards.

Bottom Line: 6/10
Over all Miyuki-chan in Wonderland isn’t bad, its just repetitive! I give Clamp credit for trying a unique take on this classic story line, but its just a shame there is no over all story concept to this OVA. To its credit though, it is cute and entertaining for its short little span. Though I can’t promise you you’ll be re-watching this that much. I recommend it for the Clamp fans and Yuri fans out there. Not great, but not all that bad either.

Has the audacity to do the complete stories of BOTH main Alice stories, just cramming them in there with none of the charming weirdness of those original books, just unexplained madness crammed into thirty minutes.

Heard this was one of those "old queer icons of anime" kinds of stories, but whoever I heard that from must have been completely wrong, because this is just teenage boy fantasy bullshit, where some innocent teenage girl is molested by various poorly designed, scantily clad women as the story goes through the motions of telling a story. The worst part about it is that the girl expresses zero interest in ... any of this (though, being dreams, maybe you could argue... whatever), so it's all just attempted sexual assaults that she just barely makes out of each time. Honestly, something of a horror story, just one with an upbeat (and uninterrupted) soundtrack.

We are better than this. Friends don't let friends watch bad OVAs about predators.

Fushigi no Kuni no Miyuki-chan is a two episode Madhouse OVA based off of a relatively short, comedic Clamp manga. I have talked about Clamp's works quite a bit since I've also reviewed xxxholic, Blood-C, Cardcaptor Sakura & Magic Knight Rayearth. So far, only one of those has been largely negative. So, that's not the worst record out there. But let's see what happens with this one.

Story:

Our heroine, Miyuki, wakes up one morning after a nightmare we don't get to see. She notices she's running late and hurries to school with toast in her mouth. Which is a completely original gag that has never been used ... in anything else. A scantily clad bunny girl skateboards in front of her, muttering how she is also late. They both fall into a hole, the bunny girl likely regretting her lack of safety pads and a helmet but we don't see her again. Miyuki gets pulled into the chest of a girl who is also a door and goes into Wonderland where scantily clad women all want a piece of her. Seriously, she has more women pursuing her than Inés, except non-consensually. The second episode is close to the same set up, except she gets pulled through the looking glass.

The biggest problem with the OVA is a very simple one. The comedy is shite. Miyuki basically moves from one awkward situation, where buxom, predatory lesbians try to grope her without her permission, to another and struggles to escape. That's the entire joke of the entire OVA. Because it's such a hilarious joke that this high school girl is being assaulted. Because when women do that to other women it magically becomes funny... because shiny umbreon has blue rings.

Even if the joke was conceptually funny instead of being blatantly terrible, it would be so heavily run into the ground that it would be melted from contact with the molten core. There's a reason a good comedy will find new and unexpected things to do with its running gags because a comedy needs an element of the unexpected to really work. If you know exactly what's going to happen as soon as the set up starts, the joke probably isn't going to be funny. So, we face a situation where there's one joke and it's not even conceptually funny. 

Characters:

There's no real sense of character in this. Every character Miyuki encounters is pretty much defined by being a predatory lesbian who will freeze to death the moment temperatures drop. Miyuki herself is just boring. No personality. No comedic quirks. 

Art:

The artwork isn't very good. It's not so much that Clamp likes to give its characters awkwardly elongated limbs as it is the series emphasises skimpy outfits and other fan-service elements over anything that would be good. If we're going to take a detour through worlds based off of Lewis Carroll's classic stories, we should have some strange, whimsical scenery and objects to capture our attention but in this version, the scenery and backgrounds are pretty boring & low effort. Clearly, they thought your eyes would be somewhere else but my mum taught me not to stare at noodle-limbed ladies with awkward proportions. 

Sound:

The acting is pretty bad. I don't blame the cast since Madhouse did get some skilled people including Kouda Mariko. I think it's more that they have nothing to work with. Miyuki spends her time crying out or being startled. The rest of the characters might get one or two lines. Honda Toshiyuki's soundtrack is pretty bad. Most of the series uses the same intense comedic music on loop. It might be an innocuous enough track if they played it a few times, but when it gets repeated over and over and over again for close to thirty minutes it makes you want to drop kick a baby. 

Ho-yay:

The whole premise is based on predatory lesbians, so there's a lot of groping. 

Areas of Improvement:

Make it funny. There's so much potential for strong, quirky humour using Wonderland & the world through the looking glass as a backdrop. You just have to take advantage of the strangeness of the situation and actually make the characters funny and quirky instead of just molesty. 
Vary your music. Because using heavily repeated music to annoy your audience into dropkicking babies is not a good way to solve global overpopulation. 
Revamp the shoujo ai aspect. If you want to make a shoujou ai work based off of Alice in Wonderland, I think that's great and I'm all for it. But making all your characters offensive predatory stereotypes is not the way to do it. You could have Miyuki meet a bunch of really homo-erotic girls with fleshed out personalities and funny character quirks. You could have her meet and travel with one and give the pair a budding romance. You could have her come to terms with her own sexuality after seeing new and wondrous things on her adventure. Any of those would have been much better. 

Final Thoughts:

Fushigi no Kuni no Miyuki-chan is complete crap. Horrible humour, artwork that's only passable at being exploitative, a music loop that gets obnoxious quickly. At least it's mercifully short. I'm giving it a 2/10. 

Miyuki-chan in Wonderland is a REALLY entertaining series which is about something as simple as an inversion of the classic Alice in Wonderland. An ordinary Japanese schoolgirl has weird events happen to her which don't necessarily need explanation, as they're simply here as placeholders to get the story going. It's clearly a parody and may have been done on a low budget seeing as there's only two known episodes, but that's okay; its benefits more than make up for its flaws. To start with, the series is a hilarious take on the original Alice in Wonderland story with pretty much literally every element imaginable sexualized. ... A lot of this is played for comedy, and it's actually extremely entertaining to watch this girl I don't even know or care for stumble around, getting into trouble. This is sort of like Love Hina, though it's able to take its plot for the complete joke that it is and thrive off it, allowing itself to go into extremes. One thing I will say is that this series is not for the faint of heart, specifically those that are offended by sex (particularly jokes regarding LGBT and BDSM), but aside from that relatively limited category, it thrives at what it does. It's actually a shame there were only two episodes, because this could have been a great comedy series if fleshed out properly. 8/10!

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is one of my favorite stories. Be it the original book, the 1951 Disney movie, the 1999 Nick Willing movie (which is the most faithful to the book albeit minor changes), and I even enjoyed Tim Burton's version despite it being different. I have not read Alice Through the Looking Glass yet but plan to and know some concepts of it. Sadly however, there are bad versions/adaptations of Lewis Carroll's work, like The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland, which had a great concept executed poorly, falling victim to corny silliness and bastardization of classic Caroll characters, and this anime ... right here, Miyuki-chan in Wonderland, a shitty two episode OVA which had great potential but unfortunately is not only so bad it makes the Care Bears version look like a Disney/Don Bluth film/faithful adaptation of Alice, it is probably the worst adaptation or interpretation of Alice in Wonderland I have ever seen. What went wrong with it? Well...

Story (0/10, but had to choose 1 because this website does not allow 0 or negative numbers)

The first problem with the story is, well...there really is none in this version of Wonderland!! The story begins similar to the classic tale, Miyuki (who in this version is running late to school) notices a rabbit who is late, then falls down a hole into Wonderland, she encounters a door with a woman on it, but when she can't find the knobs, it turns out they're on the woman's....and I'm sure you know where this is going. Remember how in Sailor Moon Crystal Season III I hated that scene with Uranus assaulting Moon with that disgusting kiss? That's basically the problem with this, all this version which combines elements of Wonderland and Looking Glass, is just a bunch of lesbian/yuri fanservice (which I normally wouldn't mind) where Miyuki is sexually harassed by any character of Wonderland in the first episode and Mirrorland in the second. What the fuck, like literally, what the fuck? Is this what should count as "storytelling"? There literally is no plot to this anime at all, it's just random events where Miyuki has to do sexual acts or almost get sexually assaulted that come out of nowhere and happen for no rhyme or reason, it's creepy and bordering on rape, or stuff when Miyuki has to face herself and see herself strip, sex, sex, SEX!! It's like what's happened to MLP in a way, all the animators did was take Lewis' story and turn it into an oversexualized environment. Sure, they have some elements from the stories like the Drink Me shrinking thing and the chess game Alice partook in, but any of these elements are ruined by the hypersexual and creepy vibes that this anime spews out, and makes you feel like you took some weird drug trip. Each episode, of course, ends with Miyuki waking up and realizing it was a dream, but then she has to go out, leave her mirror, and we realize...it never ends....and Lewis Carroll is forever rolling in his grave (also forgot there is a manga but it's equally bad).

Even Magical Mystery Tour had more of a plot than this. And you know they totally screwed up when in the chess game they broke the rules by having black go first instead of white (that's not how the rules go!!) The only good thing about this is that it's very short, both episodes are only 15 minutes, making only a half hour long anime, and it's one of those OVAs where if you saw the first episode (or vice versa), you saw the second.

Art/Animation (7.75/10)

We now come to the best part of this entire anime: the art/animation actually are quite good. The characters are mostly well drawn and proportioned, the animation movements are fluid. The colors are decent and bright, and though some backgrounds (like when you just see a moving wall when Miyuki's running) are bland, I liked the designs of the card painters and the butterfly fairy, some of the places in Mirrorland look interesting (the land with waterfalls in the sky), and the sign also makes for the only funny joke in here, the "danlrorriM ot Emoclew" sign. But that's where the upsides end.

Downsides:

Miyuki looks like your typical average sailor suited schoolgirl, but about 85% of the scenes in her are just used as excuses to see her get groped (or grope something), get her midriff and panties exposed, she literally is a walking fanservice object.

The Wonderland characters have none of the charm or wit from the Lewis Carroll versions: the Rabbit (not even the White Rabbit) is just some Playboy like girl in a bunny suit on a skateboard, Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum have been turned into Chinese twins named Cho Li and To Li (reference to Chun Li?), The Mad Hatter looks like a scantily dressed magician, and the March Hare, Dormouse and Chesire Cat with their female human bodies in skimpy clothing (Chesire Cat looking like a cat girl crossed with Lum from Urusei Yatsura, in fact) and animal ears look more like something some weird furry would draw than actual animals, and the Evil Queen like some pin up girl. The characters in Mirrorland are nothing special, Don't expect to hear the Dormouse tell the story of the three sisters in the treacle well...

And for fanservice, there's a lot of it, groping, peeking slapping, detailed nudity (including nipples). If you're a fan of yuri fanservice or lesbian fanservice, or like seeing assaulting, you'd like this but I felt sick and very uncomfortable. I find it shameful that CLAMP, the same company that made Cardcaptor Sakura, would associate their name with this, and how they wasted so much paper, ink, paint, clear plastic for this...

Sound (2/10)

(This anime only was released in Japanese, there was never an English dub.)

This is another big failure. The voice acting was subpar, not even the names of Emi Shinohara, Rica Matsumoto, Megumi Ogata, Masako Katsuki, Kikuko Inoue, Ai Orikasa, nor Sakura Tange could save this. Mariko Kouda (Miki from Marmalade Boy) tries to have Miyuki sound like your typical, high pitched, cute and energetic school girl, but her high pitched screaming just becomes annoying after a while. I can't blame any of the voice actresses though, they had to read terrible scripts.

The music is even worse. Aside from one forgettable ending song and one in the beginning/end of each episode, all that plays throughout this anime is this annoying, wacky, jazzy-tune-you'd-hear-if-somebody-tripped-and-fell-down-a-bunch-of-stairs-and-banged-and-bruised-their-body-up-and-caused-internal-injuries that plays over and over and over and over and OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN...till you can't stand it and shut the anime off.

Characters (0/10, but had to choose 1 because this website does not allow 0 or negative numbers)

The weakest part of this anime entirely, this anime goes by with its random scenes so quickly it has no time to establish the characters, none of them, not even Miyuki herself, has any character traits or personality at all. That's all I can say.

Overall (1/10)

Remember how WatchMojo claimed in their "Top 10 Worst Hollywood Remakes" video Tim Burton's version "added nothing to the legacy of Alice in Wonderland" (because we clearly saw Alice slay the Jabberwocky in other versions of it!!)? They never saw this. If you ever wanted to see how NOT to make an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice stories or show people what the worst adaptation of those stories, or to anyone who needs a quick session with fanservice, show them this, or play a drinking game if you want to have fun with friends. Otherwise, avoid, avoid, avoid. You're not missing anything by missing this, and with it being only 15 minutes per episode, being basically just half an hour, it's not worth buying for like say $20-40, or however much it was back in the day. You could just look it up on this FantasyAnime website I found, but no, don't. Like I said, don't waste your time.

Though this anime seems to have fortunately drifted into obscurity mostly, it should have met its true fate. What is it? To quote a certain Queen...OFF WITH ITS HEAD!!!

And now I gotta go drink some bottles of hard lemonade that say "Drink Me" on them...

This anime wasn't any good. The story was boring and the characters came off as flat. Though the art style and animation quality was pretty good - though some of the designs (such as the Doorway Girl, Butterfly, Five of Spades) could have been done much better. And if you're going to secualize women...the least you can do is make them of legal age (or at least in their early to mid 40s). Though why did all the women in Wonderland wanted to get together with Miyuki - heck, they never even got together with Miyuki; they just flirted and attempted to seduce her (if ... barely). I mean, if you're going to get erotic...the least to can do is go either all the way, or at least most of the way. And everything is so short and rushed that there is no character development, or any time to really enjoy the story. The whole plot was basically all over the place.

I will say that some of the characters (such as Cheshire Cat, Jabberwocky, Hatter, Humpty Dumpty, Queen, White Rabbit, and even the twins Cho Li and To Li) had the best designs in this project - and I really wanted to see much more of their sexiness - Cheshire Cat and the Queen being the sexiest. But even that weren't enough to save this. Maybe it should have been about a young man who ends up in Wonderland, and actually gets together with all the women in that world - and in the end...he refuses to return to his boring life back on Earth, and decides to stay in Wonderland with his harem.