#64: Alice: Otherlands
Animated attempt at Alice revival is interesting, but not as compelling as it should be
This review was originally posted to Twitter on March 12, 2019.
Initial release: October 30, 2015
Director: American McGee
It’s obvious that American McGee views the Alice series as his baby. And why not? It’s what made him famous, before he pissed his good name away on Bad Day L.A. But this animated attempt at keeping the franchise alive is hit-or-miss. Adapted from ideas for a third game, this pair of animated shorts was successfully funded on Kickstarter and animated by Spicy Horse staff. The net result is two wildly different pieces that exemplify the Alice franchise’s weird mix of good ideas marred by bad ones.
The first short, “Leviathan,” stars none other than French sci-fi pioneer Jules Verne; the latter, “A Night at the Opera,” features Richard Wagner. the implication is that “Leviathan” comes before “Opera,” but I’m going to review “Opera” first, because it’s far less substantial.
I’m not going to get into a discussion about the animation style. “Leviathan” has this anime-esque cel-shaded 3D look that a lot of people were unhappy with, but it’s far superior to the clunky stop-motion of “A Night at the Opera.” It’s strictly a love-it-or-leave-it affair.
Supplemental material tells us that it’s 1876, a year after Madness Returns; Alice, now 20 and working backstage in the London Royal Opera House, accidentally knocks a large glass marble onto the floor while cleaning. the marble rolls into a little diorama and disappears. Alice crawls into the diorama and finds herself on the front stage, where Richard Wagner himself sits atop a podium of trumpets. The rest of the short is a fairly simple affair where Alice, to the tune of parts of Wagner’s operas, fights a dragon to get her necklace back. The entire thing is done in stop-motion, but it’s clunky and ugly, falling far short of even Nightmare Before Christmas. The animators tried valiantly to make Valhalla et al. look cool, but the characters themselves are a mess, Alice especially. At only 8 minutes, there simply isn’t really much to discuss. It’s mostly just alice’s imagination getting the better of her — again. Wagner himself is barely a character; his music does the talking for him. It’s disappointing because the other short is much more interesting.
“Leviathan” is not much longer than “Opera” but it packs much more into its ten-minute running time that might actually be a good basis for the hypothetical third Alice game. It’s not the best animation — recalling to mind the rough early years of RWBY — but that doesn’t matter because the substance makes up for it. It’s difficult to really describe “Leviathan” as anything other than a love letter to Jules Verne using Alice as the medium, and a rumination about Verne’s influence on science and progress, and how his work would inspire children into becoming scientists. Moving from one scene to the next, each representing one of Verne’s seminal works (like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Alice and Jules discuss their fears — or rather, the concerns one may have about scientific progress and unintended consequences.
There’s so much of import in just ten minutes; in context it’s Verne contemplating what would be his last novel (Paris in the Twentieth Century) and its look to the future; but it also raises relevant questions about science today, and how stories inspire future generations. It seems to be much more Verne’s story than Alice’s, which raises some interesting questions as to how exactly they’re having this conversation. While Verne was alive in the real Alice’s time, he’s portrayed as much older in this short than he was when he wrote the book. Logical questions aside (given that Alice disappears when Verne reaches the epiphany that Alice was nudging him towards, it’s obvious that this is all in Verne’s head, anyway) it’s still a thoughtful piece that has me hoping for a more substantial direction for this series.
While Otherlands may be seen as something of a disappointment, especially to people who were hoping for a whole new game, I think it makes a decent denoument to Madness Returns. Let’s hope that the upcoming sequel follows more after “Leviathan” than “Opera.”
P.S.: you can watch both shorts on Youtube or Vimeo. here’s “Leviathan,” with unobtrusive subtitles, which you’ll want for Verne’s thick French accent, and here’s “A Night at the Opera” with much more obnoxious subtitles.
