While I've said I'd like to watch more mainstream anime this year, I found it hard to resist Alice in Cyberland, an anime that, based on its popularity ranking, you most likely haven't heard of. It's an anime that piqued my interest the more I dug into it.
Old, obscure media is very near and dear to my heart. There's a special feeling, a uniqueness that watching something new and popular can't replicate. When a story, song, or show is not only old but obscure, it feels like defying fate by experiencing it. If I made just one other decision, I wouldn't have even heard of it let alone go out my way to watch it — I can't help but find it all a bit romantic. . Beyond that, I like to consider myself an archivist (others consider me a packrat, but you know what they say: sticks and stones) and keep momentoes of what might otherwise have been forgotten. And, boy, does that ever apply to Alice in Cyberland. The anime was apparently considered lost media for quite some time — while both episodes of the OVA were broadcast, only the first episode was released on home video, leaving the second to be lost for a quarter of a century. Watching it feels like I'm an archaeologist rediscovering an ancient crypt long thought to be lost to the sands of time. I'm excited not to just satiate my own curiosity, but to share what I've found with others. I can't help but feel a sense of pride at the thought that I convinced someone to watch something they would never have heard of, otherwise.
As it relates to anime in particular, dredging up old, forgotten shows feels like I'm doing my part in helping dispel tired discourse — the idea that new anime is all garbage while old anime is all gems. Instead of simply replying "ok boomer," I can instead explain why their thinking is flawed — they naturally remember all of the recent anime that came out, including the mediocre ones, while they selectively remember only the great anime of old. Better yet, I can show them why their thinking is wrong. It's not like they'll remember Alice in Cyberland and once they watch it, it'll be clear that not every single anime before the 2010s was a masterpiece.
Why watch old anime to have an appreciation of the past and your place in the world when you can use them to win online arguments, amirite?
But don't go thinking that Alice in Cyberland is only notable as it relates to the present — the anime was pretty damn wild for its time, too.
The Alice in Cyberland anime was created as part of a multimedia project, which makes this anime even more fascinating to me. I touched upon multimedia projects in a recent review where I essentially said I think they're an exercise in hubris. To combine analogies, expecting multiple entries of a new IP spread across different forms of media to sell is like counting all of your chickens in one basket before they've hatched. It's just begging to fail and Alice in Cyberland is a prime example of that. The project featured this OVA, a video game for the Playstation, an OST for said game, and not one, not two, but three audio dramas. It was clear Glams, the company created to produce the Alice in Cyberland, expected the series to sell like hotcakes. Naturally, they were in trouble when it ended up selling like Ezekiel Bread. Grams promptly folded like origami and the anime was canceled. The cancellation is actually what brought this anime to my attention — anime that are canceled mid-production are so rare that I just had to see this for myself. The multimedia approach even caused problems prior to cancellation. As we'll get into, the second episode is rough and I'm certain it ended up in such bad shape because Glams was hemorrhaging money because some genius CEO greenlit so many expensive projects right out the gate.
And if all that wasn't interesting enough, the script was written by Chiaki Konoka, who went on to write for Digimon, Serial Experiments Lain, and The Big O, among other shows. Three of Lain's friends are even named after the protagonists. In regards to this anime, Konoka had this to say:
The anime version [of Alice in Cyberland] was so bad that I was stunned when I saw it on air (the first episode was still bad, but the second episode was especially bad). Fortunately, or perhaps tragically, no one saw the anime version on TV except me (or so I stubbornly believe), and it never even became a legend.
That's a glowing endorsement if I ever saw one!
The production surrounding Alice in Cyberland is more interesting than the show itself. It's a bit unfortunate, but it happens — sometimes finding the map with the X and digging for the treasure is more exciting than what's in the chest. I think you get the most out of Alice in Cyberland if you're drawn in by the absolutely wild story of its production and you like to fashion yourself as an anime historian/archivist/archaeologist. I don't really think the anime is particularly noteworthy beyond that, but others beg to differ. You see, this anime has an average score of 38% which is very, very low, the second-lowest on my list, in fact. I won't pretend this thing is good — even as forgiving as I am toward anime, I can't let this eke out a D. That said, the quality isn't insane it's just...odd.
Alice in Cyberland takes place "20 years in the future" where the internet has evolved into a VR environment called Cyberland. Cyberland is a fixture in daily life, with people more interconnected than ever before. This reliance on Cyberland brings dire consequences when the internet is used nefariously. The "Cyberanarchists" have begun hijacking Cyberland, rendering its users amnesiac and it's up to Alice, Leina, and Julie to stop them.
And that's really all you're getting here. The first thing you'll notice about Alice in Cyberland is that nothing is explained. And I don't mean "not explained" as in the show drowns you in confusing technobabble. No, I mean "not explained" as in the show just doesn't bother exploring its concepts, no matter how basic or vital. In fact, I'm pretty sure the reason that the first episode's antagonists are named something as hilariously generic as "Cyberanarchists" is because you still get a some sense of what these guys are — Alice in Cyberland essentially does everything in its power to elaborate as little as possible.
This is very noticeable because the type of story they're going for doesn't work with this narrative philosophy. The first episode of Alice in Cyberland is essentially an origin story — showing how our heroes got their start, but everything happens so quickly and is framed so inconsequentially that it undercuts any sense of awe when our heroes suit up. Here's just a taste of the type of questions you'll be asking:
Who are our heroes? What's their relationship to each other? What are their daily lives like?
A random computer program named Lucia grants Alice her powers. How? Why? What exactly are those powers and what makes Alice and co. different from other people in Cyberland?
Cyberanarchists can erase people's memories? Excuse me, what the fuck? How does that work? Does the anime conflate computer memory with human memory (even if it did, that wouldn't quite work, because the closest thing to human memory as it relates to computing would be data)? If it is, then how exactly are they inducing memory loss? It's not like they're hooked up to a VR headset. People are wearing Great Value Beats By Dre (no, not Raycons) then forgetting how to drive a car.
I could go on, but my point should be clear. I have a pretty good idea of why this problem exists: Alice in Cyberland's format. This anime is also interesting because it exemplifies some of the worst traits OVAs. Unless a script-writer had the chops to make a story work with the format, an OVA would feature a very dense, claustrophobic story. OVAs (at least shorter ones) actively discouraged ambition (or, again, it discouraged ambition without having a very solid grasp of time constraints) and so the bigger they were, the harder they fell. You see it in Macross II, you see it in Outlanders, and you see it in Alice in Cyberland. And don't go thinking that 30-minute runtime helps the show at all. Alice in Cyberland is approximately the same runtime of a standard anime episode. The extra 8 minutes of the first episode are dedicated to advertising the game and audio drama. Speaking the which, I'm sure the team believed that since there were two other projects releasing alongside this one, it meant that they didn't need to go into as much depth and thus the anime feels half-baked. For what it's worth Konaka seems proud of the game. Unfortunately, I can't read a lick of Japanese.
Circling back to the traits of an OVA, the shorter runtime meant that animation of one could be better than a full-length TV anime. With less ground to cover, animators could focus on making those two episodes stunning instead of pulling teeth to make 50 episodes adequate. The operative word here is "could" because, paradoxically, an OVA could look worse than a TV anime. This is going into conjecture, but I imagine that since an OVA was less commitment than a TV show, many people thought they could get rich quick by making an OVA. If you were in Japan from 1985-1995 and went to an anime studio saying you wanted to make an OVA, I'm certain they'd let you. As long as you had the starting capital, nothing was stopping you from making a fool of yourself. And oh boy, did Glam ever make fools of themselves.
I think the animation of episode one is ultimately fine, but two is where you can see the studio begin to run on fumes. I'm someone who can stomach bad animation and even I noticed it — for one, the bad guy of the episode inexplicably silently opens its mouth whenever it’s firing its attack. Maybe its beam was originally supposed to come out of its mouth, but the result makes him look like he's shy, so he begins speaking before deciding not to. It's bizarre.
While the first episode is just kind of odd, the second episode's wonky animation combined with its quick-pacing and genuinely odd plot makes for a fascinatingly weird watch. I'm still not quite sure I'd go so far as to call it "so-bad-it's-good," but I did catch myself riffing the episode as I watched, so it might be worth it watching it with friends.
There really aren't that many intentional positives to this show. The music is pretty damn good. Maybe I just have a thing for 90s music, but the OP, ED, and even the goddamn song playing during the advertisement were all very infectious. If the Cyberanarchists were playing this OST to induce memory loss, I'd be a goner.
Beyond that the character designs aren't terrible, I suppose. They're nothing to write home about but if you have a fondness for 90s anime character design and nostalgia for hand-drawn animation, you might dig them. The best thing I can say about them is that their "Cyber Warrior" outfits look like Frame Arms Girls about twenty years before they existed.
While the setting of Cyberland is still quarter-baked, you can still see Konaka's fascination for the interconnectivity of the web within it. It's interesting that our reliance on the internet was accurately predicted. With the advent of the Metaverse, it seems like we might be getting a VR hellscape of our own. Maybe Zuck will be able to erase our memories with bops, but I'll leave the tinfoil hat theorizing to Konaka himself.
Writing this review, I've decided to amend my stance, a bit. It's fair to say that*Alice in Cyberland* is a damn fascinating anime in all aspects. Whether you're a media archivist, an OVA aficionado, a multi-media project skeptic, simply an enjoyer of bad anime, Alice in Cyberland has something for you. Hopefully, you decide to give it a watch because it's the type of anime that needs to be experienced rather than described.
