I bring this up not to go into some deep, pretentious analysis of this topic within the show, though there is some material there. Rather, I bring this up because Alice to Zouroku could have really benefited from taking a good, long look at itself in the mirror and seriously asking these questions.
Hereafter referred to as “AtoZ”, Alice to Zouroku seems to face a bit of an existential crisis. The issue here is twofold: one pertaining to its focus as a whole - in other words, what it is - and the other to its appeal or value to viewers; its purpose for existing in the first place.
Genre-wise, AtoZ mainly functions in two sharply-contrasting halves. One half of it (technically closer to two-thirds) is mainly slice of life with some interesting fantasy elements incorporated, while the other is more focused on action and drama. It does eventually stick to the former, but much of its runtime is spent stubbornly refusing to commit to one or the other, which comes at the detriment of both halves not being as well-realized as they could have been.
This kind of balancing of vastly different genres isn’t the easiest thing to pull off, but here is one area where I’ll give AtoZ credit. While its choice to hedge its bets does limit its greater potential, the show actually does an okay job selling the shift between them. The show spends long enough between genre shifts (usually a full episode or two) to allow its desired tone to properly settle in. This means that when it’s in slice of life mode, it actually manages to feel like slice of life, as opposed to just “down time” between action set pieces. Meanwhile, the more dramatic points still feel like more than just diversions. The series manages better than most to have two personalities at once; one for exciting times and one for laid-back moments.
Even with only a 12-episode lifespan to work with, I’m glad it at least managed to explore the slice of life portion to a satisfactory degree, because that half is actually quite decent. The dramatic elements, on the other hand… well, to put it bluntly, they kind of suck. I’ll get back to that.
Unfortunately, for AtoZ, contrasting genres isn’t the real issue here. A more notable issue is a lack of any substantial standout qualities – something to make it appealing over any other story of its type, particularly with how many of its wildly varied ideas are commonly seen in other series. Pretty much every individual element – every idea and its exploration - in AtoZ ranges from decent enough to outright bad, and none of it comes together to create something greater.
Starting with the presentation, how are the visuals? They’re okay, I suppose. Color-wise? It’s fine. Character designs? They’re distinct-ish. Animation? Average to stiff. Level of detail? Not bad. Character expressions? Functional, but nothing more. There’s plenty of CGI, but it isn’t integrated very well into 2D scenes. There’s also an extended action sequence featuring some full 3D shots, and while it is decently dynamic, it simply doesn’t look that great (and that’s not even counting one hilarious animation error involving a moving background outside the parked car). What about the rest of the action? It’s nothing special. There’s no impressive choreography or impact, nor much emotional buildup, and little to no tension (as I’ll expand on later). There’s one exception that was actually solid, but the action as a whole isn’t much of a selling point.
So if the visuals can’t impress, then what about the sound? Well, the voice work is competent (subbed; haven’t seen the English dub), including vocal expression and delivery, but it’s not outstanding. Sound design? It works, I guess. Music? Actually, the soundtrack, while not that memorable in its own right, is often quite evocative in context, and I quite like the opening and ending themes. But does a modestly above-average OST do enough to make otherwise mediocre presentation great? It does not.
“But so what?” one might ask. After all, almost every aspect I’ve listed so far, while typically unremarkable, is still acceptable, including the show’s handling of multiple genres. At the end of the day, the presentation is nothing ruinous, and it doesn’t have to be great if there’s strength of substance being presented.
Sadly, this is where the show runs into a serious fundamental problem: AtoZ, at least during its non-slice of life moments, is straight-up poorly-written. Those dramatic elements I mentioned earlier are seriously squandered by persistently low quality of writing.
The series tries very hard during these dramatic scenes especially to keep things flexible and varied. On one hand, the show poses all sorts of questions about Sana, her existence, the facility she escapes from, and several characters, among other things. The show leverages these questions and finds a degree of success here in initially hooking viewers. Alright, seems fine so far.
But on the other hand, there are all the different powers that Sana possesses, and they pose a real problem: they’re too powerful. Their versatility is taken way too far to give the show any hope of telling a compelling dramatic story; creating matter to summon pretty much anything, mind-reading, flying, manipulating objects, teleporting with some control over the destination, and that’s just from episode 1. Later points introduce some other equally if not more broken powers. Sana can pretty much do whatever the plot demands, and that includes pulling new abilities out of thin air whenever convenient. Normally, the established powers are already enough to prevent the main characters getting into truly tight situations, but even in rare exceptions, Sana possesses so many convenient powers that there’s usually nothing stopping the series from just coming up with a new way out for her or others on the spot.
The only semblance of a limitation on Sana’s powers is her current energy level, which in practice ends up almost a non-issue for her. When it does come up, it can easily be fixed as soon as Sana gets a hold of some food. How does the series compensate? Simple: make Sana conveniently not have eaten enough since last using her powers.
This lack of sufficient limitations also creates all sorts of loopholes that quickly result in things falling apart. For instance, why can’t Sana just teleport out of every problem? The show only bothers to contrive an excuse about half of the time, usually something to do with food again, and even those aren’t always very well conveyed or thought out. Any other time, it’s like everyone just outright forgets. That’s a real tension-killer, and it’s far from the only tension-killer this series falls victim to.
There are other writing issues present, which include plot holes, other loopholes, inconsistencies, contrivances and so on that bring the whole thing down anytime it attempts something dramatic. I’m going to get into some plot/event spoilers for the first 5 episodes here to go over some of them; scroll past to skip them. Now, I want to be fair to this show, so only things I feel have at least a noticeable effect on either the show’s integrity or the viewer’s experience are included.
With that said, let’s begin!
*****SPOILERS FOR EPISODES 1-5*****
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- The show tries to make Sana’s recapture seem like a huge threat, but her teleportation ability undermines this. Even if, somehow, she gets kidnapped, attempts to rescue her fail, AND she gets taken back to the lab… so what? As soon as she isn’t actively being pinned down, unable to use her powers (and they have to let her use her powers eventually or they can’t do tests with them), she could just teleport away! That is, assuming she isn’t “conveniently” too low on energy at the time for that to happen, but this was only the case on her initial escape. There’s just not enough sense of finality or decisiveness to the threat of Sana’s capture, which only serves to dampen the suspense even more than it already was.
- Furthermore, Sana gets a tracking device put on her for safety before her kidnapping in episode 3. Setting aside the fact that this leads to even less tension, even Sana’s successful capture would just serve to easily reveal where she and the research lab are located. And the show tries really hard to make this whole sequence dramatic. It doesn’t work.
- Episode 1&2: Sana, while a few normal pancakes away from fainting, was easily able to teleport both herself and Sanae to many random places in quick succession. This includes Antarctica, tens of thousands of miles away, and then she brings back a swarm of pigs along with them. This only serves to make the brokenness of her teleportation more obvious, while seemingly contradicting the “conservation of energy” rule established. (Apparently all those pigs combined have less energy value than a few normal pancakes.)
- Episode 1: in the car chase, there was no apparent reason why Sana and Zouroku couldn’t just teleport themselves away and use Sana’s powers to replace the car on the other end. She had enough energy to easily lift the entire car, drive it around, and detach her opponents’ giant chain - a quick short-distance teleport at least to a nearby hiding place should have been no trouble. But nope, got to keep the poorly-rendered car chase going!
- During the kidnap in episodes 3-5, instead of using her powers to teleport Zouroku to her, Sana could have just teleported away herself. Clearly neither a lack of energy nor her being pinned down was preventing her from using her powers, seeing as she manages to summon Zouroku, heal herself completely and then literally rewrite her situation mere minutes later to get rid of the hands pinning her down, all with no extra food. (And as mentioned before, this whole time we know Sana has a tracking device on her, so everyone is obviously going to have no trouble getting to her. The lack of tension continues!) At least the sequence led to some decent, if rather forced, character development.
- Sana can instantly and easily look into anyone’s head and find out everything about them and their background, including what their relatives are doing (episode 1; she finds out about Zouroku’s granddaughter). This makes the mysteries surrounding who characters are, the facility she came from, where that facility is, what their motives are, and who Sana herself is, become completely trivial matters. Sana should have figured all this stuff out, either while she was at the lab or after her escape, but the issue is never brought up.
- This anime’s plays for sympathy typically fall flat. The lab just does vaguely (very vaguely) “horrible things” to its subjects for energy experiments for which we’re given no context as to why they should ever have involve horrible things, because they’re the show’s generic evil organization figure which exists for the sake of weak drama and making us feel sorry for Sana. Minnie C immediately blows her clichéd “dead partner” backstory in an attempt to make her a sympathetic villain, except that we don’t even know her enough to feel any kind of attachment or sympathy. But hey, got to have an excuse to make her a menacing and villainous woman who is mean to children and shoots one in the leg without remorse to stop her from acting out of line.
- On that note, Sana getting shot in the leg by Minnie C is probably the show’s most egregious example of a failed sympathy card. “*gasp* NO! SHE SHOT THE CHILD!” the audience cries, only for it to barely matter 2 minutes later because it was instantly healed with Sana’s usual overpowered magic abilities while she simultaneously rewrites her situation so she isn’t even pinned down. Really? Neither one of these abilities was established beforehand, and 2 minutes later it’s like Sana forgets she ever got shot, with no effect on her personality or outlook. All that came out of it was brief shock value and another excuse for Sana to have low energy and require a delicious Snickers® bar to later recharge. It just ends up feeling like cheap plays for emotions because this poor, poor child is captured and pinned and scared and wetting herself and is in pain for a few moments. All this, while we know she’ll just be rescued shortly because of the tracking device. It’s overblown, ineffective in context, and too shamelessly manipulative. Yes, drama is technically manipulative by nature, but this show makes its manipulation mechanisms way too obvious to the viewer to be effective. It’s clear when the show is just playing for cheap sympathy points, and in many cases, it comes across as desperate.
AtoZ’s dramatic elements aim for flexibility, but ends up creating loopholes and relying on half-assed excuses. It tries to create suspense, and mostly fails because of said loopholes. When it goes for sympathetic, shocking or dark elements, they feel cheap, and there are overall hardly any successful dramatic scenes. As a whole, the quality of writing just isn’t up to standards, and at times, it gets plain annoying.
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*********END OF SPOILERS**********
But with all those issues out of the way, is Alice to Zouroku an irredeemable show? Well, maybe not.
There’s a certain major development and shift that comes up in the middle of the series, almost out of nowhere. Some might call that another instance of poor writing. I’m going to call it a miracle, because it kicks of the “second half” of the story, where, at last, the series actually focuses on one thing! No more poorly-written pseudo-dramatic nonsense; just slice of life albeit more whimsical than average with some wonderland-fantasy elements. And the show definitely benefited from this transition, going from something I generally disliked to at least finding passable for the rest of it.
Despite all of the writing problems present in the dramatic portions of the show, the slice of life components fare significantly better. When the series opts to focus on the more down-to-earth relationship between Sana, Zouroku and Sanae, most of the writing issues don’t apply. Granted, the occasional questionable element still pops up; these are mainly smaller details like Sana using her energy-demanding powers to fly because she’s supposedly too tired to walk, or her saying she hadn’t eaten in 3 days even though she clearly ate a rice ball earlier that afternoon, but none of it is stuff that cripples the antics as a whole; at worst, it might affect a brief interaction that is quickly moved on from.
As for the antics themselves, they’re not going to blow anyone away, but they do offer a few decisive strengths.
While the supporting characters of Alice to Zouroku are straightforward and unremarkable, the chemistry among the main duo is actually fairly strong. Zouroku’s staunch no-nonsense attitude makes him stand out from your typical guardian-figure lead. For Sana, whenever she’s not reduced to a plot device (something thankfully exclusive to the dramatic elements), watching her try to understand the world around her can be interesting.
Ultimately, though, it’s the way these attitudes contrast and bounce off each other that make things endearing, and it also leads to the occasional bit of genuinely solid comedy. Most of the gags revolve around Sana getting confused or making a naïve comment because she’s still learning and/or Zouroku’s stubborn nature. While comedic subject matter itself is highly subjective, the show does fairly well in terms of setup and delivery. The jokes are fairly infrequent (I wouldn’t call this a comedy-focused series), but the ones it has are rarely predictable, well-timed, and never overbearing, nor do they get hammered in and outstay their welcome as if viewers are too stupid to “get it” otherwise (that last issue is a particular pet peeve of mine, so well played, AtoZ).
“Don’t stand on the chair!” will go down as a favourite of mine with the context in which it was said.
So, are these slice of life portions enough to save the show?
Ehhhhhh…
Like I said, they may be the more decent parts, but I wouldn’t call them exceptional. The show’s one real strength – its comedy – is sorely underutilized, and about a third of the show still consists mainly of poorly-written and almost entirely failed attempts at drama, action and suspense, so by the time it finally gets comfortable, its integrity is already compromised.
Still, passable is passable, and the show deserves some credit for managing to recover from its extended weak beginnings, albeit having to do so with near-complete abandonment of its original direction. By the end, it just barely manages to find itself, but the two halves and even ideas within each half are a bit disconnected. As for convincing reasons to recommend it, or strong justification for its existence, I’m a bit iffy on both accounts. This is one of those cases where I think the show genuinely improves over its runtime, and the show’s last few episodes were easily its strongest; it just does so by so frequently changing face that it often struggles to have a real face at all. It never quite reaches the point where I’m comfortable saying, “Yes, this is worth watching!” Your mileage may vary.
First half: 4/10 – Second half: 6/10 – Overall: 5/10
A large enough portion of Alice to Zouroku’s runtime is spent on its functional fantasy-slice of life antics that there is still some value in the final product, despite it having very weak dramatic writing in the first half. That said, the product as a whole is decidedly lacking in focus and cohesion, ultimately resembling a haphazard hodgepodge of theoretically workable ideas, forced into an oddly-shaped blender that couldn’t properly handle them all. When the resulting pulp gives off a murky, unremarkable appearance, fails to acquire any consistent standout elements, and clutters up what could have been its main draw, I have to question what it really offers over many other series in any of its veins.
