Kagihime Monogatari - Eikyuu Alice Rondo

Information of Anime

Aruto Kirihara is very interested in the storybook Alice (aka Alice in Wonderland).  In fact, he researched it & learned that the author had three volumes about it.  However, the third volume, Endless Alice, had never been published & is considered as a myth.  Aruto dreams about find this lost book & begins writing his own version of Endless Alice.

One night, Aruto sees two girls fighting in the air.  One of the girls is his perfect model of Alice.  Seeing "Alice" defeating the girl by "unlocking" her stories, he gets confused on what is happening.  He learns from "Alice" who's name is Arisu Arisugawa, an Alice User, that she is collecting parts of Endless Alice by battling other Alice Users.  Together they look for stories to complete the long lost third volume.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  This section does contain some spoilers.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

Basically it's about Alice users fighting against each other to collect stories to complete Endless Alice.  Arisu, Aruto, & his sister Kiraha Kirihara, who's also an Alice user, work together to collect these stories.  Aruto isn't an Alice User but he is able to enter into the Wonder field easily due to his determination of collecting the stories.  To prevent Arisu & Kiraha from taking away other Alice Users' stories, he has the ability to copy exactly what the stories are by writing them down.  By doing so, he doesn't physically take away their stories.  What's interesting about his ability is how it will be a key factor in the Alice wars.

By collecting all of the parts of Endless Alice & completing its story, it can grant a wish; even with Aruto's ability to copy stories.  This keeps going until Kiraha starts to become jealous due to Arisu being with Aruto a lot like lovers.  This briefly creates problems within the team for a bit.  But things take a big turning point when the group invites a new member who's goal was to trick them to defeating each other.  The plan temporary worked until she got defeated & Kiraha is the only one left standing.  The reason for it was Arisu being a fictional character that Aruto made in his Alice story.  Arisu is a character brought to life in Wonderland Space using his powers.

While Aruto turns into a wreck about making Arisu, who is sealed in all this mess, as a replacement for his love for Kiraha, the Alice Master reveals himself as L. Takion, the creator of the Alice stories.  However, Riddell who is really Alice kills him as she tries to make Wonderland Space as her own.  Plus, she reveals that the Eternal Alice was just a story to have Takion notice her as he was having writer's block.  After killing Takion, she turns her attention to Kiraha to get her story.  After getting his sense knocked back into him, Aruto uses his powers to free Arisu & having her fight with Kiraha against Alice by using his writing powers.  However, Alice is spared as Arisu decides to stay in Wonderland Space & everything is return to normal.  However, the show has one episode left & ends it with a different matter.

In the last episode, Aruto reads a story he made to Kiraha about how he & her tries to save the land of stories.  With the exception of Aruto & Kiraha, everyone don't know each other & those girls you saw in the ending credit roll finally make their appearances here by fighting Aruto & his group.  That mini story ends with those girls being defeated & the king & queen of the land of stories are released.  It ends with Kiraha asleep & Kiraha looking at the moon, indicating that main story hasn't really sway off from this mini story.

My Personal Review

Kagihime Monogatari - Eikyuu Alice Rondo has an interesting theme concept that you don't normally see.  It uses a well-known storybook & builds around it's history.  The idea of collecting the stories seems cheesy, but the plot may be a strong point for this show.  If you haven't done so, you may want to get some background about the story of Alice if you don't know about it.

Animation

The drawings are kind of interesting.  The eyes are kind of creepy with them being large & having two tones.  It makes them look like robots.  However, throw in their Alice uniforms & bunny ears, they look cute.  In fact, the uniform look very good with their unique designs.  The character of Aruto looks a bit girly with his hairstyle.  I'm beginning to think this is some sort of trend going around lately.  The intermission & chapter title scenes are CGs as you see a mechanical rabbit walking around moving clock gears.

The backgrounds are ok & a bit colourful.  It makes the town look too new.  It would have been nice to make it a bit duller to show some age.  A good thing about it is how it blends with the characters well without problems.

Animation flow is pretty smooth.  Even on those silly scenes it looks so natural.  The mechanical rabbit at times looks too fake though.  When it jumps, it looks like it's floating instead & it looks weird.

Sound

The sound effect are ok and the volume level is just right.  There are more realistic type of sounds than sill cute ones here.  This is kind of a surprise to me.

The music is nothing special.  In fact, I don't like it.  It's kind of bland & got no feel to it.  The music genre matches the anime's theme well, but they aren't something I'll remember.

The voices are not bad.  Aruto's voice is a bit on the girly side.  However, the seiyuu doing his voice is young & new to the industry so I would go easy on him at this time.  His performance on Aruto's moods aren't bad.  The girls aren't bad as well.  But they are a lot of high pitched voices here.  But they aren't too bad.

Story

Your basic "collect something to make something" idea, but with an interest element twist.  The use of the third volume of the Alice storybook is quite interesting as not many writers seem to touch this area from my personal experience.  There is a bit of a love story on the side involving yuri & it's quite funny.  Despite the interesting idea, the story doesn't hold up very well.

The characters are quite weak, especially Aruto.  I felt he was too isolated to himself & gets weaker & weaker as the story progresses.  The flow & pacing is fine for a short show, but I felt Aruto's strength was a bit too rushed even though I wanted him to get stronger from all those fights in Wonderland Space.  The story got less interesting as it reached to a conclusion.  It tied up the story well at the end, but it felt too sudden a bit.  The studio should have used the last episode to fill it up a bit instead of giving some sort of fanservice of girls in the show & in the ending credits.

Overall Conclusion

Kagihime Monogatari - Eikyuu Alice Rondo was interesting from the start, but loses it near the end.  I would credit this as something original as not many people touch the background of Alice.  Personally, I would suggest watching this if you want to know what the writers think about the third volume of Alice.  But I can't really recommend it at the same time.

Kagihime Monogatari - Eikyuu Alice Rondo gets a seven out of ten from me.  The show has a lot of potential at the start by using something not many writers touch on.  But it falls short when it reached the end & the character development was lacking a lot.  The only good thing about it is the idea of a third Alice story & how a lot of series don't seem to touch this area.