Alice in Anime Wonderland

Few children's novels have achieved the level of notoriety that shoujo.” He defines this as not simply an equivalent of the English word “girl,” but rather as encoming the three Meiji ideals of girls' education and behavior: chastity, affection, and aesthetics. This enduring definition of proper femaleness, along with the virgin/whore dichotomy, has made Alice, particularly as represented by both Tenniel's illustrations and the 1951 Disney film (released in Japan in 1952), a symbol of that ideal.

Who is the Japanese Alice? In the 1899 version she was a girl named Mie, in 1908 she was Ai. She's a teenager mourning the death of her sister while being romanced by rabbits, jokers, and hitmen, a girl trying to kill her siblings to rule the family, a confused young man not sure who he really is. She's a magic power and curiosity, irresistible to lesbian Clamp characters, she's a magical girl. By the end of this article we may not fully know who Alice Pleasance Liddell becomes when she's in Japan, but we can certainly see some of the specific permutations her story takes as it inspires a pop culture far different from the one she was born of.

Straight Adaptations are probably the rarest of the bunch. It does make sense, given the fact that the first translation wasn't all that faithful – there are aspects of Alice that appeal to Japanese culture, but other parts are either too British, too Victorian, or simply too much of an in-joke between Carroll and his original audience of the three Liddell girls to be interesting. (For a good explanation of all of the jokes, I'd recommend checking out The Annotated Alice or The Even More Annotated Alice.) The best example in this category is the 1983-84 TV series Fushigi no Kuni no Alice, which pretty much just takes the original story and animates it, similarly to what Disney did in its 1952 film. The character designs are much less Tenniel-inspired, which is interesting, as it makes the story look more like it's for children than some other versions. Every so often child-friendly manga adaptations appear as well, such as Rod Espinosa's manga-style version, or just illustrations that hark back to the original text. As far as Alice in anime and manga goes, this appears to be the format that gets the least love, but it does prove a good jumping off point for other variants.

One where there's some crossover between strict Alice adaptations and more fanciful ones is the Gender Swapped takes on the tale. yaoi take on the story, romance is central, again leading up to some slight crossover between popular ways to adapt Carroll's texts: romance.

Lewis Carroll's Alice may have been about seven years old, but that hasn't stopped anyone from making her older and setting her up with younger, hotter, and more human versions of Wonderland's denizens. One of the best known is Heart no Kuni de Ochakai features a heroine who is not named Alice but dreams of going to Wonderland. A boy who befriends this poor little rich girl helps her to find Wonderland for real, which in turn makes her a more comfortable, happier person. There's a sweet romance in here, but it's almost more Alice-themed, which is probably the most common way that we see Alice herself in anime and manga.

Probably the best example here is a 1998 TV series called Alice 19th manga, which takes a magical girl approach to the old Alice game: her Alice is granted the power to go inside of people's hearts with the power of words. In the same vein Vanilla Ware's game Odin Sphere also uses a little girl named Alice to tell its story by having each chapter of the game open when she reads its story in a book – the power of words when wielded by an Alice inspires storytelling once again, which is a fitting tribute to Carroll's work.

We can probably give the game American McGee's Alice a lot of credit for popularizing our next category, though: violent Alice. Released in 2000, the video game spawned a lot of Goth imitators, and that was not strictly relegated to the US where the game was initially released. Jun Mochizuki, which has a lot of elements of both the violent style of Alice retelling and the simple thematic. I tend to put it here in the more violent category because things get pretty grim for protagonist Oz, and his companion Alice is known as the Bloodstained Black Rabbit. Pandora Hearts draws from a lot of different fantasy works, but Carroll's duology is a major source of inspiration and a large part of what makes it fascinating in the first place.

The final typical type of Alice tales is probably the most common: stories that simply have Alice mentions or themes without making it the entire story. This would be series like Kiss and Never Cry. Alice is everywhere if you look for her, and her enduring popularity is both a testament to the international appeal of Lewis Carroll's books and a treasure hunt for her fans. Who would have thought that a story made up to entertain three little girls in the mid-19th century would have such reach? It's a wonder indeed.

Don't forget to tell us your favorite Alice anime and manga versions, as well as any that didn't make the list in the forum!