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Miyuki-chan in Wonderland
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Title Info
- seen: 1 of 1
- type: movie
- grade: flawed
- people: CLAMP
- Other elements of this title:
- This title has been commercially released in Australia.
- genre: erotica
- made: unknown
- Review created: A while ago, i'll revise it eventually.
- mod: none
This is a product of the all female anime and manga studio CLAMP, which makes this anime all the more suprising. Effectively it is an exercise in fan-service (for males (although there are some lesbian overtones), with all the characters in the anime being female) based around the parodying/perverting of a beloved childrens book. The OAV contains two stories, roughly based on the two Alice in Wonderland books, although both are very short (~15min). For those who haven't read the books (shame) the world of Alice in wonderland is full of very exotic characters, playful dialog and a lot of humor in a very surreal world. The interesting thing is the world is quite strange, and sometimes threatening, and the story is quite complex in parts, which makes for an odd mix of the mature and childlike. Thus you can sort of see where someone got the idea of converting all the characters into `adult' mode as an opportunity to draw lots of attractive women in revealing, thematic outfits.
From there it probably seemed a logical step to animate it, including lots of `adult' versions of the events in the book. I suspect this was the sequence because the focus is clearly on the visual designs, with the dialog being limited, the story largely absent and the individual encounters fairly short. The quixotic humor of the book is largely absent as a result. Indeed it feels like a bunch of visual jokes and character re-interpretations strung together rather than a full product in itself. I have no idea what those unfamiliar with the book make of it.
The production itself is sketchy, lower than clamps usual standards, with many short cuts and highly simplified backgrounds. The music could best be called `energetic', but is more likely to be called awful. This would have been fun as an art-book, but as an anime it really is a vacuous waste of time. And while the addition of extreme fan service (there is lots of fondling, peeking up dresses etc.) makes it more sellable (it has a local release) it doesn't make it any better (unless you really like fan-service of course).
The Anime Movie Guide gives it a very generous review, which makes me further doubt their ratings. The Anime Critic agrees with the guide in this review despite noting its weaknesses. I get some support comes from Lord Carnage who goes in swinging in this review, and warns "Only to be viewed as an example of what happens when an excellent studio does something phenomenally bad". Those THEM give an excellent review in which they wonder what the intent was. Worth reading the review if only for the "hamster in heat" analogy. All the reviews praise the production, and compared to the average ecchi title it is good, but there are much better visuals (including all other clamp productions) out there.
Words by Andrew Shelton, Web by Ticti, Last Compile: Wed Aug 5 12:39:22 WST 2009