Manga Review: Alice In Wonderland – Special Collector’s Manga by Jun Abe

Title: Alice In Wonderland

Author: Jun Abe

Publisher: Diamond Book Distributors

Date: June 7th, 2016

Format: eARC

Source: from Publisher for a review

Synopsis (from Goodreads): Manga publishing pioneer TOKYOPOP is back … bringing readers Disney Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” a retelling of the film in manga style. Alice Kingsleigh was a young girl when she visited the magical world of Underland for the first time. Now a teenager, she spots a white rabbit at a garden party and tumbles down a hole after him where she is reunited with her old friends. Alice soon learns it is her destiny to end the Red Queen’s reign of terror.

Review:

If you’re a fan of Disney’s Alice In Wonderland movie (from year 2010), there’s a great chance you will LOVE this manga.
Why?
Because it is almost exactly the same.

For those of you who still haven’t seen that fantastic movie produced by Tim Burton (What you are waiting for??!), here is what the story is about:

Several years has passed and Alice is a grown girl now, old enough to get married and start her own family. However, Alice does not feel comfortable with that and she still finds herself daydreaming everyday: wondering how it would be like to be able to fly, picturing the impossible.
Her nights are filled with dreams of Wonderland and all those silly creatures that live there.
One day, as she is older, she sees a rabbit with clock and starts following him around.
You can guess what happens next!
You’re right! She falls into a whole that leads her back to Wonderland.

I really, really enjoyed this story.
If you didn’t know, I am a huge fan of the movie, so it is no wonder that I enjoyed this manga so much.

As I already said, it is almost exactly the same as the movie.
The only difference I noticed is that at the beginning of manga we get to see Alice as a little girl and her father talking with her before her sleeptime, while in the movie Alice told us about that, but we didn’t get to see it.

I liked the art in this manga. Characters looked so much better then in the movie (not sure if that is unintentional critic for the actors but… bare with me). Alice and the White Rabbit were so beautiful but yet simple, and as for Hamish – he looked like a model here. So much more handsome then Hamish from the movie (again, every insult aimed at actor is unintentional).

There is only one character that I didn’t like how was drawn, and that is Mad Hatter. While in movie he looked perfectly (and I was never  too crazy about Johnny Depp so that has nothing to do with him), here in manga he looked like a weird skinni woman.

All in all, I would recommend this manga to everyone who likes the movie but also to anyone who still hasn’t seen it.
But, if you disliked the movie, you probably wouldn’t like the manga either, so I would suggest you to skip this.