(13 episodes)
What’s it about ?
Magical dolls fighting each other.
(In case you’re wondering, this is a complete reboot of the franchise ; not having watched any other version, I’m treating this as a new show.)
Characters
Jun, our male lead. He may be a recluse, but the breakneck pace doesn’t have room for much elaboration. He receives a box with a living winding-doll out of nowhere one day, and stays in perpetual bewilderment of all the craziness that ensues.
Shinku, said winding-doll. She’s part of a lot of seven that are part of the “Alice” competition, where they all battle against each other. I gather that the idea is that each one has a portion of the soul of someone important, and the goal is for the winner to collect all seven bits, by absorbing their opponents’.
Suigintou is clearly the baddie amongst the seven : she’s got black wings, which is never a good sign, engineers confrontations between the other, and kill-steals on at least one occasion.
Suiseiseki is at least on friendly terms with Shinku, and doesn’t look like much of a threat anyway -desu. She’s come to ask some help against her twin Souseiseki -desu.
We actually see all of the dolls this episode, including the one who doesn’t have a proper body anymore.
Production Values
This looks much nicer than I’m used to from Studio DEEN, with tons of CG elements that sometimes look a bit like overkill (the ballpoint-pen, really ?). There’s no denying this has got tons of budget, at least for the first episode.
The OP is the ALI project doing the same song they always do. The ED is a much more atmospheric piece.
Overall Impression
Hey, who’s got their finger stuck on the fast-forward button ? There’s just so much stuff happening in this episode that it becomes a bit overwhelming, and doesn’t allow much depth for any of the characters. As a result, there’s very little incentive to care about anything that happens. There doesn’t seem to be much substance beyond the battle royale plot involving dolls with pretty clothes.
The main problem seems to be that it needs to slow the hell down and give the characters room to breathe ; as I don’t expect it to do that with such a short running time, I won’t be bothering with it.
