Fushigi no Kuni de Alice to: Dive in Wonderland

This movie is an entertaining, quick-paced commentary on job searching and modern societal issues through the lens of various interactions from Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll's original book, not the Disney movie).

Knowing the story of Alice in Wonderland does not spoil this movie, because it does not follow the events of the book. Some interactions are present, but the overarching storyline and details are all different. I'd like to say that you could watch it with a clean slate, but despite this, Rise knows the story of Alice in Wonderland, and sometimes key details get ommitted on the assumption that the watcher knows them already.

The ... original Alice in Wonderland separates itself into chapters, where each chapter typically documents Alice's interaction with one character or at one location, then through some tie-in, be it a guide or just directions, gets sent to the location where the next chapter takes place, so it comes across as a more seamless journey of sorts. This movie tries to follow that same style as inspiration, having a chapter-based anecdotal storyline, but it fails to tie them together sometimes, so the changes between chapters often gave a bit of storyline whiplash.

That ties into the pacing as well, as this movie very strongly suffers from movie time crunch, being only an hour and 35 minutes long, but tries to convey a lot of the different interactions in the original Alice in Wonderland in ways that twist the story a bit. To add to this, they spend about 7 minutes on a scene early on in the movie that provides no character interactions or thoughtful dialogue and basically only leads to a scenic shot that tries to convey "Wonderland is wide". It was a bit on the nose and honestly made the world in the film seem a lot more like The Wizard of Oz than Alice in Wonderland.

Moving to the actual story, this movie tries to retell the anecdotes found within Alice in Wonderland with the added twist of trying to provide commentary on modern issues like SNS addiction and how society has become too busy. It's an interesting take on the story, and it does advance the plot, but Wonderland being Wonderland, this seems a bit contradictory on a fundamental level.

The dialogue, as with Alice in Wonderland, is quite unpredictable and makes the overall experience pretty fun despite the issues it has, so especially for people who liked Alice in Wonderland, I would recommend watching this movie.