The anime consists of 30% closeups of the characters to ensure that you can see the enormous hairdos.
Above tagline comes from Digital_Ronin, so if you think it's not funny, blame him :)
Animation: Cheap.
I wish I would have more to say about the animation, but this really sums it up already. The characters suddenly lose all distinctive features once they aren't in the foreground and the backgrounds are often a blur, as if they thought it wasn't worth spending time on. And while the characters have quite some hair, it usually doesn't move at all, as if it were ‘stuck’. But also the characters often don't show decent movements. Brusque, sudden movements, together with jumps without actually moving the legs are some of the things which made me quite annoyed.
The character design is quite odd. Huge hairdos, while the breasts of the girls are quite big. And with big I mean between big and enormeous, related to age; 14 year olds get big, 16 year olds get enormeous. And that sometimes distracts from the already not-so-great plot.
Sound: I really hoped they taped the mouth shut of that annoying male lead.
I have to admit that both the OP/ED were not that bad, and the only reason I skipped it was because I didn't feel like spending too much time on the show, since it didn't have that much to offer. The music in the series was only average as far as I heard, but to say honestly I don't really remember much of it.
Then the voices; while most of the girls had a voice fitting for them, the voices were not all enjoyable. For instance, Kiriha has a pretty annoying voice (and character). There are a couple of other characters which have voices you don't want to hear more often, but the worst one is the male protagonist. The guy doesn't only look like a spineless wimp, he also sounds like it. Oh, I'd have killed someone to shut up that guy.
Story: Covers all bases. And then I mean all.
The startThe story starts off horribly dull, with a guy even more uninteresting than I imagined, and goes on like that for like 5-6 episodes. Characters get introduced on a regular base and although it doesn't get interesting at all, it does help in getting to know the characters.
The middle-partThe middle part starts somewhere near episode 7. Episodes 7-9 are the episodes which pull the story sidewards, towards the idea of the well-known jealousy-plot. Unlike the start, they build here on suspense and mind-games which didn't really feel like they belong here, but it grows on you. Finally some seriousness in the show!
The end-gameThe ending (episodes 10-12) is what we call ‘Alice goes NGE’. Seriously. I thought the middle-part had some heavy stuff, but they throw everything over and make the mind-games, revelations and plot twists in there in order to cover everything they haven't covered yet. I have to admit, I didn't like most of the characters, but they also didn't really fit this creepy NGE-styled atmosphere all around the series. But the story does the trick. Whether it makes the series better I'll leave open, but it does the trick nevertheless.
The epilogueWait, there's still an ep 13. So yeah, one would expect a sort of epilogue. But it isn't! Instead of dragging the mind-games further, they throw everything overboard and make it a filler in RPG-style. Does it have anything to do with the story before? No, absolutely nothing. So, what's the point of it? I guess they wanted to have an ending which wouldn't lay down so heavy on the mind-games … but to make this they must've been pretty desperate. Still, it was a fun episode, with parodical jokes which were actually funny sometimes.
But that's not all. There are also things like this:
At some point, the entire room of the protagonist is set on fire, yet they keep talking for half the episode, while all of the precious books of the protagonist (including the one he writes himself) are burning. Do they take action? No, they do not. And only after 1/4 of the episode has passed, they go to save his book. Is it just me or are they utterly slow up there?
Characters: Name one character not worth cutting up.
There are quite some silly characters in this series, for instance:
A girl who walks with her head into a tree and actually keeps on walking while her head's already against the tree until someone stops her. Is that silly, or what? I suppose it is meant to be funny or cute, but just like all the other things, it just doesn't work.
She says ‘Andersen’ all the time and for everyone who's even slightly literate in terms of books, this shouldn't be too hard to figure out, considering the series is about Alice.
All of the ‘Seekers of Alice’ (for Dutch people SoA might be a pun by itself) are annoying from the start, perhaps except for Arisu Arisugawa (what a name in a series named Alice) and Kirika-senpai, who tends to blurt out cold and often crude remarks without bothering how the others feel about that, often resulting in pretty funny conversations.
But despite that, most of the characters are quite bad shaped in terms of character sheets. They also don't really mind much consistency, seeing how that shy girl doesn't dare to speak even to the brother of her best friend in one episode, yet in the next episode she talks to him like it's the most common thing in the world.
Enjoyment:
If I said I'd enjoyed watching this series, I'd lie. But I have to admit that the series took turns for the better and actually managed to surprise me at times where it made a 180-degrees turn. From sappy comedy to disturbing incestual issues, to mind-playing tricks, to flat out parody-comedy, it has it all. While the border between those is sometimes missing, all of them work well. If only they would have used characters more fitting for those genres, it would've become better, but due to the big-breasted, trying-to-look-cute characters it doesn't really get beyond the ‘I don't really have a clue what we're making here’-phase.
