It’s obvious that American McGee views the Alice series as his baby. And why not? It’s the game that made him famous, before he pissed his good name away on Bad Day L.A. But it's also been a franchise he's struggled to really get off the ground. His attempt at a third game was a failure to launch, and in a bid to keep the franchise alive, he funded a pair of animated shorts on Kickstarter and got Spicy Horse to do the actual animation job. The end result was Alice: Otherlands, a collection of 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 just five minutes in length, 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.
The other short is much more interesting.“Leviathan” is not much longer than “Opera” but it packs much more into its short 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 a few 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 denouement to Madness Returns. It's a pity the franchise seems to be dead now.
-june❤
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