The Wonderland, originally titled Birthday Wonderland, is a 2019 Japanese animated film about a girl who goes to pick up her birthday gift at her aunt’s store and ends up unlocking the portal to the world beyond, tasked with being the savior of this mirror world.
From the Fantasia Festival 2019: Right from the start, The Wonderland is all about vibrant and colorful backgrounds with a relaxing everyday veneer. We meet, Akane’s a young girl whose biggest problem is being accepted at school by her classmates, she doing the most mundane things such as wearing a hairpin. It’s a good way to start, the routines soon broken though as we enter a mirror world called World Beyond and Akane is adorned with a Momentum Anchor that makes her move forward even when she doesn’t want to. She’s seen as the Goddess of the Green Wind, the person rumored from decades ago that will save them from a major crisis by curing the Prince.
Japanese animation flourishes when it colors with environmental elements woven into their stories. For a film that focuses on a world that is losing color due to the lack of water, it still manages to keep things cheerful and appealing. To emphasize it, there are contrasts of dangerous enemies with dull metallic armor and black clothing with bright colors used for everything surrounding. While some films have buffalo stampedes, The Wonderland has swaths of of huge fluffy sheep and a scene of Akane and her aunt Chii, who joins the journey, lying on them (a parallel of My Neighbor Totoro perhaps). Their adventure continues into even more varied environments, through shades of red, pink, orange and many others. It sometimes feel magical.
The characters also are quite charming, if not pretty familiar in design. Akane and her aunt Chii are opposites as well. While Akane needs the Momentum Anchor to move her forward to be more courageous facing different situations, Chii is more about embracing the adventure and being prepared and taking chances. It’s this contrast that makes it funny and yet rather inspiring, Akane finding her strength as she embraces her efforts to save the world. Seeing the beauty between this mirror world, which has kept a more old-fashioned way of living in comparison to her reality of modern advanced technology, motivates her. This has The Wonderland falling into the ‘cute’ with sidekicks who are of course a little silly and endlessly adorable.
Filled with talking cats, underwater aquariums and more, The Wonderland is exactly as its title implies. Even with the crisis that the world faces, it still manages to keep it light-hearted. The visuals and a sweeping soundtrack certainly help with what eventually becomes a generic story, and a runtime that drags despite all the charms inside. But it’s cute and colorful, making it hard not to be a little enamored by it.