English Dub Review: Alice & Zoroku “The Queen and the Witch”

One of the worst feelings in the world is to feel you shouldn’t be in it.

Spoilers Below

Zoroku makes arrangements with his part-timers to keep the shop running while he’s gone. He has no idea how long this trip will be. Nobody knows anything about Wonderland because it’s always shifting. Signs also point to it growing at an increased rate, and for unknown reasons. But that isn’t important. Sana is lost in there, along with her “guest”, Hatori. He, Sanae, and Ichijo enter through the research facility doorway into the strange, psycho-metamorphic demiplane. How’s that for a vocabulary lesson? Just one of my many services, you can pay me later. Anyway, they enter into Wonderland and are faced with giant statues depicting Sana’s cherished memories. They discover the spotted pig from earlier in the series, and Sanae believes they should follow it. Ichijo disagrees, but before she can pull out an item to help her fly up for a better view… she vanishes! The ground beneath her disappears and she falls out of view. Sanae and Zoroku decide to follow the pig, it’s their only lead, after all.

In the meantime, Sana and Hatori climb through a dozen flights of stairs to get out of the darkest, mechanical heart of Wonderland. Hatori is determined to get back to the door Sana brought her through. It’s bound to lead her home, despite Sana’s protests. When she finally arrives at the door she opens it to… empty air. Nothing. Sana was right. When her powers glitched, the door disconnected from reality. The two take shelter in a nearby mansion in the cliffs. With nothing to do, the two start talking out their problems. When they finally resolve their problems, Hatori admits her plan. She may not go home and stay in Wonderland instead. She believes that she is the source of her parents’ unhappiness; that her own inability to get into a good school makes them fight. She also realizes that while she can force them to get along, she can see that the real them is back there inside their eyes, and it hurts her to know she’s bringing all this unhappiness to them. She thinks she should never have existed. Sana refutes this. Not because she sees value in Hatori, but because she herself SHOULDN’T exist. Like, logically there is no way her existence makes sense. She realizes that she is an avatar of Wonderland, and because of that, she’s completely expendable. Her life is meaningless. So, if she exists, then why shouldn’t Hatori? This moment of solidarity the two share breaks down Hatori’s defenses, and she grabs Sana in a hug. She lets out all the horrible feelings and decides to return home with Sana’s help.

Yeah, this episode hit a bit close to home with me. I’ve spent most of my own life with feelings of self-hatred, and wondering if the people I cared about would be better off if I wasn’t around anymore. It was a terrible feeling, and it debilitated my ability to socialize with others. I felt like they only kept me around because they were too nice to tell me to buzz off. So, I understand exactly where Hatori is coming from. Her and Sana’s lines in this episode express those feelings very well, especially from the perspective of children. And before you go on saying that these thoughts are too complex for children of that age, I’ll have you know I was suicidal in the first grade. This is very real, and the undeserved guilt that Hatori felt here is shared by millions of children around the world. It speaks to a fault in the parents, who fight without thinking about how it will affect their child. As our culture grows its possibilities and speeds of communication, the world becomes m separated and segmented. People lose the ability to truly relate to each other, to empathize and compromise. Instead, they leap into relationships that they think will make them happy. They don’t realize that they only added their own problems on with someone else’s. And then, maybe if they have a child it will bring them together. But it doesn’t. Now you have a child who looks at their parents and sees stress and anger. And they think they’re the cause. Sorry, I didn’t mean to stand on a soapbox, but this has been an emotional week of anime for me, I guess. That isn’t a bad thing. It means that there are a lot of great stories out there, and they’re very well written. This is one of them.

Visually, this episode is almost as much of a trip as the first episode of 18if. Wonderland is a psychedelic mish-mash of familiar objects that move and behave in unfamiliar ways. They’re juxtaposed with each other to serve an immediate purpose for navigation, and it all seems to be under the thumb of the White Rabbit that we thought was under Sana’s control. The realm is in a constant state of experimentation, always shifting, changing. It behaves like the mind, constantly imagining new things, and taking the things it sees and filing it away, using emotion as it Dewey Decimal system. The memories we are lead through with Sana are all about Zoroku, and focus on the tender moments. The moments that connect her to him. That is why he is being led through them, he is being taken down her emotional neural paths to reach her. The animation that we see here is often focused on the weird, so we don’t really see much as far as character animation. The “experiments” are done well. An interesting blend of CG and traditional, based on the kind of movement called for by the objects.

Voice acting, however, for the fact that this was almost all exposition and conversation, was not really all that deep. I resonated more with what was being said instead of how it was said. This isn’t to say that Sarah Wiedenheft and Felecia Angelle did a bad job here as Sana and Hatori. The characters were believable and had emotion. However, it felt like the emotion was all on the surface and not an iceberg tip. This is really my only downside for the episode, and it doesn’t kill it at all for me. I give this go around in Wonderland eight giant recap statues out of ten.