English Dub Review: Alice & Zoroku “The Little Queen”

Karma: Sometimes it takes the form of dividing by zero.

Spoilers Below

Sana has trapped Ayumu, accomplice to the evil witch Hatori, in Wonderland. She declares that she will punish the girl for helping her enemy by holding her there until she apologizes. That makes it a little hard to figure out how to punish someone when they immediately apologize. The torture session is cut short, however, by Zoroku demanding to be let in. Apparently, this section of Wonderland is connected to his bathroom door. He isn’t too happy with her warping spacetime there. She releases Ayumu, and after a stern lecture by Zoroku, she sends a little white rabbit toy to act as an avatar for a chat. Ayumu insists that Hatori isn’t evil at all, and needs Sana’s help. This confuses the little girl, and she decides to investigate further. Dropping a door to Wonderland in Hatori’s house. Hatori enters, and the two face off with words. This only frazzles Sana further, because Hatori is claiming she IS evil. After learning that Sana had a conversation with Ayumu, Hatori becomes furious, using her powers to force Sana to tell her is Ayumu had betrayed her. That’s when everything goes down hill.

Literally. The shock of defending against Hatori’s powers, Sana’s ERROR out, causing the building they are in to break and fall into the ravine below. But, with Sana’s powers on the blink, there’s no way for her to teleport them back to the real world. Worse yet, the real world begins having all sorts of errors, as the extradimensional space of Wonderland begins to grow, encroaching on the real! New Dreams of Alice begin to pop up all over the world, and a giant ferris wheel appears in the middle of Tokyo! Despite that, Ryu and his fellow agents detect that Sana and Hatori are in Wonderland somewhere, and while Hatori’s parents go looking for her in the real world, Ichijo prepares for a mission into Wonderland to locate them. Zoroku demands to join Ichijo, in order to save his adoptive granddaughter. Hurry, Zoroku! Reality is collapsing!

When I came into this episode, I figured it was going to be a pretty cut and dry affair. Sana captures Ayumu, Ayumu begs her to save Hatori, Sana understands and reaches out to Hatori, who lashes out and needs Sana and Ayumu to work together to bring her back. Oh, no. I was wrong. Instead, we have this delicious writing where Sana is at war between thinking Hatori is good and evil, and is pressed to punish her still because of her own rage and desire for revenge. This is how people actually act. They don’t change their minds overnight because of a persuasive argument. They keep pushing back against the change with their anger and stubbornness. Even more so with children, who don’t have the proper words for what they feel or self-awareness to discern what those feelings mean. It appears that Sana’s errors are even worse in Wonderland, and are, perhaps related to Wonderland itself. Though Sana claims that she is complete control of Wonderland, that may not be entirely true. I am eager to see more in the coming episodes.

While the art and animation on this show are typically good, I feel like a few points were rushed a bit. The scene early on (which you see to the right) had the girls shouting at each other, and their mouths are in a repeating, three-frame loop that doesn’t look like it is synced to anything that anyone says in any language. This seems to be the way the speech was handled all episode long. This isn’t anything unusual, mind you. Cartoons have done the three-frame-talking-loop animations since cartoons began. It just feels out of place here, where there is so much more effort put into hiding the technique in previous episodes. I really didn’t get much out of the voice acting, one way or another. The acting wasn’t bad, but it lacked emotion behind the words, and I’m used to slightly better from this series.

I give this episode seven Doors to Wonderland out of ten.