English Dub Review: Alice & Zoroku “The Kashimura Family”

But, what is Family?

Spoilers Below

Sana has an addiction. It’s so much easier to use her powers to do things. Levitate up to a light switch rather than reach for it. Float a newspaper to you rather than brave the cold. Problem is, even though her stamina is better than when she first arrived, her body is still weak from years of being ignored. She doesn’t even like walking long distances, knowing she can float. Zoroku chastises her constantly for using her powers frivolously. Instead of using her powers, he wants her to figure the problem out first. No better place to do that than in the real world. She joins him on a job arranging the flowers for an engagement party. You remember back in episode one, the Yakuza dude who was getting married? This is for him and his… wow, that is one young fiance. She’s just barely IN high school! But this raises questions for Sana, what is engagement? What is marriage? The young fiance explains to the tot that marriage is when someone joins your family, but acknowledges this isn’t the best answer. Still, the family is another word that Sana doesn’t really know.

The next day, Zoroku decides he’s taking Sana out for a haircut. She had been tripping over her long pigtails all day, and it’s time to get them trimmed. Sanae isn’t happy because she loves brushing her “little sister’s” long hair. Oh well. While she is in the salon he goes off to see his friend Ryu about getting some papers. The meeting goes a little long, and Sana gets impatient. Problem is, when she goes out looking for him, she gets horribly lost! As soon as she realizes this, she wants to use her powers to teleport straight to him… but thinks twice. His words to solve the problem herself first ring in her head. After a long time of wandering, she gets found by a passerby, who takes her to a police box to be reunited with Zoroku. They apologize for their own parts in this incident, and he tells her that if she is ever in an emergency to feel free to call him the way she did when she was kidnapped. It isn’t that he feels its wrong for her to use her powers. They’re a part of her. But, he wants her to figure out mundane solutions to problems first, and use her powers wisely. That night, he calls her back to the living room for a chat. His meeting with Ryu was about acquiring adoption papers. She is now officially Sana Kashimura. She is family.

We have left the action portion of the season behind, folks. That’s okay. In this episode, the story returns to its core. It’s about a girl discovering herself and how the world works. The writing is earthy and toothsome, almost as if it were built around real happenings and personalities in someone’s life. There’s nothing fantastic here. Just a little girl at her grandpappy’s work, and getting lost in the city. Both are very real stories, and the characters are written with enough personality to make these ordinary plots pop without ruining that authenticity. You aren’t really afraid for Sana, because you know Zoroku is going to find her, but you can still empathize with her panic. Then, in a moment that was almost like the Bible-signing scene from Anne of Green Gables, we can follow along with the joy of a little girl who finally has a place she belongs and is loved for who she is.

As this episode is mostly about the drama, the team seemed to focus more heavily on the environments and making it look good. As you can see from the stills above, there are plenty of shots with highly detailed backgrounds. I like the detail they put into the flowers throughout. That’s kind of important since one of the main characters is a florist! The animation was right. I mean to say that they didn’t go overboard to make things animate super smooth and detailed, but they put enough effort through the episode to keep it consistent. I really didn’t see any errors or wonky eyes, so they put enough effort in to do the job right. Voice acting was fine. I didn’t dislike it at all. There was one spot that the voice was not properly synced to the video, but I don’t blame the localization team on that. In these scenes, Sana is singing nonsense songs about whatever is in her head at the time. Seeing how regular her mouth movements were, I don’t even think the original Japanese voices were intended to sync up with the motion. There is no way we could expect the English voices to translate the songs AND make them match up to movements that don’t sync to words at all! It was one of the few places where the original anime cut corners, so no blame on Funimation for that. I give this episode eight lost little girls out of ten.