The Case of Hana & Alice* is a prequel to Shunji Iwai’s 2004 film Hana & Alice. I’ll tell you now, I haven’t seen that one because it’s not really readily available in English; as such, I can’t really draw much in the way of comparison between the two films. Case of is also Iwai’s first (and really, to date, only) animated film.** There are practical reasons for this. Being over a decade since the original film, the cast thereof have aged, most notably the leads, who very much could no longer pass for teenagers. In real life, that doesn’t normally stop thirty-year olds getting cast as teenagers, but it does here. Rather than go the Wet Hot American Summer (2001, etc.) route of having the clearly older cast play the younger versions of the characters they played in the original film, or you know just recasting, we get the seldom seen secret third option of animating it. As such, a sizeable portion of the original cast return to reprise their roles (for good or ill) and they can be made look as young as the animators damn well feel.

Fortunately, being a prequel, one which features the characters’ first meeting as part of its narrative, no less, it allows the characters to be introduced rather than just take it as read that we know who they are. That’s not to say it doesn’t enjoy some indulgences on that front, but we’ll get to that.

The film opens with Tetsuko Arisugawa (Yu Aoi) and her mother (Shoko Aida) moving into a new house in ‘the boonies’ (in actuality, it appears to implicitly be in Kanagawa somewhere, which is just barely outside Tokyo and is safely deemed part of its greater metro) following said mother’s divorce. Getting thrown into a new school with no preparation on anyone’s part whatsoever, Tetsuko, latterly dubbed ‘Alice’, finds herself put in the classroom where an incident supposedly occurred. There, a boy, referred to by the present students as ‘Judas’, was killed by his four wives (also called Judas, because being married, they took his name, y’see?) via poisoning, the wifeliest of all murder methods (just ask your local Classics student! Or something like that), when they found out about his polygamy. Alice scoffs, scoffs, I tell you, at this story, being as it is riddled with holes and generally pretty stupid, but nonetheless having been placed at the desk where it supposedly happened, the others in the class, led by the unfortunately named resident schoolgirl occultist-in-chief Mutsumi Mutsu (Ranran Suzuki), are not entirely pleased about the magic circle whence Judas’ spirit has been seal being broken by an interloper. Things aren’t going great for Alice then. Hidden in her closet, she finds a stash of tests with bad grades, and notices that the name on them says ‘Yuda’.† With the plot thickening, Mutsumi informs her that the only student still there who was witness to the incident is Hana Arai (Anne Suzuki), the girl who ostensibly sits behind Alice in class who was held back, but she hasn’t been to school in an age.

So, yeah, there’s quite a bit going on in the film. That’s only really the set-up, and it ignores all the vague cul-de-sacs. Par exemple, there’s a minor thread where Alice wants to take up ballet classes again but doesn’t think that her mother would be able to afford them given their current situation. It doesn’t really go anywhere; it all gets resolved pretty quickly without any real conflict or anything, and appears to serve primarily so that the actress who played the ballet teacher in the original film can have a scene. The main form of those aforementioned indulgences; appearances by cast members of the earlier film that don’t really serve much purpose narratively. That’s not to say that these are a problem exactly. The brief scene appearances by the ballet teacher or Alice’s father or whatever do help flesh out the world; the ostensible central conflict doesn’t really define it or who the characters are. Of course, complaining about lack of conflict in that scene is disingenuous anyway, as the whole film is characterised by a dearth of it. The central mystery enjoys incredibly low stakes, and the thing feels like it’s more supposed to serve as portrait of Japanese suburban teenage life than anything.

At this point, I should talk about the animation a bit. The whole affair is heavily rotoscoped which some people might find distracting. The implication, though I couldn’t find any real confirmation, is that the footage being rotoscoped was in fact performed by the actual cast, thus allowing the animators to accurately capture their energy and so make it seem more like they were outright reprising their roles rather than animated facsimiles. All very admirable if true, but it does lend the animation a noticeable stiffness; a not uncommon complaint that I’ve seen about anime is that it tends to be comparably stiff compared to a lot of western animation to begin with, but here it’s quite definitely more so. There is no real exaggeration of stuff whatsoever. It takes some getting used to.

You know, the only previous Shunji Iwai film that I’ve seen at time of writing is All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001). This is… not that, to say the least. It does deal with some similar themes regarding the teenage experience, bullying, mental health, that sort of stuff, but The Case of Hana and Alice has a considerably lighter touch than the terminally bleak Lily Chou-Chou. It’s all a lot more wholesome, also with considerably more flagrant product placement.‡ Everything’s all very likeable and pleasant. The final product is decently funny and decently relatable, with the characters applying a plausible sense of teenage logic to the mystery, such as it is, which is somehow super important while also entirely mundane and irrelevant.

* Or 'The Murder Case of Hana & Alice', as it's sometimes called. Even the official release seems inconsistent on that front, though this alternative title is probably closer to the original Japanese.

** Fireworks (2017) doesn’t count. While connected to Iwai’s 1993 film, as far as I can tell, he had no hand in its production.

† In case you were wondering, given as most Japanese Christian terminology is derived straight from Latin, 'Judas' is rendered as 'Yuda'.

‡ The 2004 film was originally commissioned by Nestle as a bunch of shorts for the 30th anniversary of KitKats in the Japanese market. If you’ve been on the internet at all, you’ll know that Japan seemingly bloody loves KitKats, with a wide array of limited and/or regional varieties in flavours that may or may not sound grody as hell. Quite how many remnants of the films origin remained when the shorts were expanded to a feature I don’t know, but this film does have a scene which quite blatantly features a KitKat (even if the characters don’t specifically say it, the logo is prominently displayed) and the end credits do specifically mention Nestle sponsoring production, so… Oddly the scene in question doesn’t feature the KitKat having the desired effect. Presumably this is not a tacit admission that KitKats actually kind of suck. Aw, yeah, gimme that weird tastin’ Nestle chocolate and soggy-ass wafer. Pfft, Time Outs were the money chocolate-‘n’-wafer bar, I tells ya.