ANI-MOVIES: *The Case Of Hana & Alice

Where as the rotoscoping in The Flowers Of Evil didn't win much love, the same film style was used in this animated prequel to the live-action movie, Hana And Alice. The original movie's creator Shinji Iwai did this as his first animated project highlighting the origin of two schoolgirls' friendship.

A teenager going by the name of "Alice" because of a change in her family as her mother divorced her father after writing a tell-all book about him(a plot point that gets little expansion on it), and has moved to a new town. Her new school has a ghost story behind it in the seat she is assigned to in class which belonged to Yuda, a former student. The whole story turns out to be largely bunk as Alice befriends her shut-in neighbor Hana, who was the childhood friend of Yuda, and knew that he left due to a family affair, but sabotaged his goodbye from school because he used a method of gaining multiple girlfriends that she originally intended to confess her feelings for. Hana stung Yuda with a bee in revenge, and became a shut-in as she's afraid the sting might have had an allergic reaction killing him. Alice and Hana's quest to discover if Yuda is still alive by trailing his father home from work, of which leads to an entire subplot with Alice falling the wrong man for several minutes of the film. The two girls spend the night outside Yuda's apartment waiting to find out if he's still alive, and Hana opens up to Alice about how guilty she feels about possibly killing her old friend. Yuda turned out to be alive, and this gives Hana the strength to go back to school with Alice as her classmate.

The original Hana And Alice movie was more about a love triangle forming between the title characters and a boy they meet as they go onto high school. So, this prequel shows how this bizarre friendship was formed from two characters who don't even meet up until about halfway through the story. The effect of rotoscoping works splendidly with photo backgrounds and CGI animation giving hope for the future of this time honored technique. The story itself can drag at times, with several points which lead to nothing much in the overall narrative, like Alice's newfound love for ballet, or the scam of Yuda's death being used by someone to gain success at school as a fake psychic. It is possible to completely skip the original live-action movie, and still have an enjoyable enough time watching this slice of life story.