English Dub Review: Alice & Zoroku “Dreams of Alice”

That is a lot of pigs.

Spoilers Below

Zoroku’s granddaughter Sanae has returned from camp, and she’s been warned about their mysterious visitor. Sanae works hard to win Sana’s trust, including a pig puppet. The magical girl responds with a flood of real pigs. Dealing with the porcine deluge, the two grow closer, and Sanae manages to convince the girl to come down for pancakes. As she waits, the little girl relates her story. When she was first picked up, she was feral. She didn’t understand language, but used her psychic powers to understand the researchers’ desires. She was introduced to the Hinagiri twins, who taught her everything she knew, including how to read, write, and speak. However, one of the experiments done in the facility went wrong, turning one of the Dreams of Alice into a monster.

With her belly full, Sana decides that now is the best time to go after the research facility, but will pick up Zoroku first. Without any real frame of reference as to where Zoroku is, however, they end up taking a long series of random teleports: The sky, an airport landing strip, the south pole… They return home after they discover the joys of penguins, but the pigs get loose and stampede. In a panic, Sana teleports herself, Sanae, and all the pigs into Zoroku’s shop by accident, and mayhem ensues. As Zoroku lectures the girls, an old government acquaintance of his walks in the shop.

This episode was written in a rather awkward way for me. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of plot progression in the truest sense, just a series of strange incidents as the two girls bond. The story gets perforated by bits of Zoroku calling his acquaintance, and the guy explaining to his coworker how he knows the old fart. The episode ends almost as if it were a commercial break. The government agents arrive, stare at the scene, and the female agent says they have work to do, but not in an ominous way. More of a gentle reminder to her partner. You feel like more is going to happen, but it doesn’t. The stinger doesn’t really seem to have much to do with that ending, either. Just the director of the bad guys saying he’s going to have to call in “Minnie C” (The chick with the giant arm). The writing isn’t bad, it just doesn’t flow in a way I’m expecting, and just sort of falls off at the end.

I like that we get to see a bit more of her backstory, and I thought it was really clever that Sana actually had to be taught that there was a difference between herself and other people. As a psychic at such an early age, it makes sense that she would have a difficult time understanding that. The twins actually taught her sapience, in a way. Seeing vaguely the reason she left makes sense as well. I had wondered why she hadn’t tried to leave before if she was so bent on revenge. This shows that there is a particular event she witnessed, which showed her the facility had to be destroyed. So, even though the episode’s plot progression was weird, it also revealed various tidbits without playing their full hand.

The animation was not bad for the most part, but I noticed a few lazy keyframes where the faces didn’t come out right. It wasn’t horrendous, and it didn’t bring me out of the show at all, but it was a bit I noticed. Tia Ballard has returned from Masamune-kun’s Revenge, this time portraying Sanae. Tia does a good job with this sort of sweet, adorable characters, as we saw from her voicing of Sonoka (one of Aki’s “Bodyguards”), even though the sweetness was a front in that case. Here, her voice has lent a kind, motherly air to the character, a silent patience that suits the character well. Really, Funimation’s dub was solid and held a better norm for the show given the weird writing. I give this episode six piggies out of ten.