Anime: Kagihime Monogatari Eikyuu Alice Rondo

The anime consists of 30% closeups of the characters to ensure that you can see the enormous hairdos.

Above tagline comes from Digital_Ronin, so if you think it's not funny, blame him :)

Animation: Cheap.

I wish I would have more to say about the animation, but this really sums it up already. The characters suddenly lose all distinctive features once they aren't in the foreground and the backgrounds are often a blur, as if they thought it wasn't worth spending time on. And while the characters have quite some hair, it usually doesn't move at all, as if it were ‘stuck’. But also the characters often don't show decent movements. Brusque, sudden movements, together with jumps without actually moving the legs are some of the things which made me quite annoyed.
The character design is quite odd. Huge hairdos, while the breasts of the girls are quite big. And with big I mean between big and enormeous, related to age; 14 year olds get big, 16 year olds get enormeous. And that sometimes distracts from the already not-so-great plot.

Sound: I really hoped they taped the mouth shut of that annoying male lead.

I have to admit that both the OP/ED were not that bad, and the only reason I skipped it was because I didn't feel like spending too much time on the show, since it didn't have that much to offer. The music in the series was only average as far as I heard, but to say honestly I don't really remember much of it.
Then the voices; while most of the girls had a voice fitting for them, the voices were not all enjoyable. For instance, Kiriha has a pretty annoying voice (and character). There are a couple of other characters which have voices you don't want to hear more often, but the worst one is the male protagonist. The guy doesn't only look like a spineless wimp, he also sounds like it. Oh, I'd have killed someone to shut up that guy.

Story: Covers all bases. And then I mean all.

The start
The story starts off horribly dull, with a guy even more uninteresting than I imagined, and goes on like that for like 5-6 episodes. Characters get introduced on a regular base and although it doesn't get interesting at all, it does help in getting to know the characters.

The middle-part
The middle part starts somewhere near episode 7. Episodes 7-9 are the episodes which pull the story sidewards, towards the idea of the well-known jealousy-plot. Unlike the start, they build here on suspense and mind-games which didn't really feel like they belong here, but it grows on you. Finally some seriousness in the show!

The end-game
The ending (episodes 10-12) is what we call ‘Alice goes NGE’. Seriously. I thought the middle-part had some heavy stuff, but they throw everything over and make the mind-games, revelations and plot twists in there in order to cover everything they haven't covered yet. I have to admit, I didn't like most of the characters, but they also didn't really fit this creepy NGE-styled atmosphere all around the series. But the story does the trick. Whether it makes the series better I'll leave open, but it does the trick nevertheless.

The epilogue
Wait, there's still an ep 13. So yeah, one would expect a sort of epilogue. But it isn't! Instead of dragging the mind-games further, they throw everything overboard and make it a filler in RPG-style. Does it have anything to do with the story before? No, absolutely nothing. So, what's the point of it? I guess they wanted to have an ending which wouldn't lay down so heavy on the mind-games … but to make this they must've been pretty desperate. Still, it was a fun episode, with parodical jokes which were actually funny sometimes.

But that's not all. There are also things like this:
At some point, the entire room of the protagonist is set on fire, yet they keep talking for half the episode, while all of the precious books of the protagonist (including the one he writes himself) are burning. Do they take action? No, they do not. And only after 1/4 of the episode has passed, they go to save his book. Is it just me or are they utterly slow up there?

Characters: Name one character not worth cutting up.

There are quite some silly characters in this series, for instance:
A girl who walks with her head into a tree and actually keeps on walking while her head's already against the tree until someone stops her. Is that silly, or what? I suppose it is meant to be funny or cute, but just like all the other things, it just doesn't work.
She says ‘Andersen’ all the time and for everyone who's even slightly literate in terms of books, this shouldn't be too hard to figure out, considering the series is about Alice.

All of the ‘Seekers of Alice’ (for Dutch people SoA might be a pun by itself) are annoying from the start, perhaps except for Arisu Arisugawa (what a name in a series named Alice) and Kirika-senpai, who tends to blurt out cold and often crude remarks without bothering how the others feel about that, often resulting in pretty funny conversations.
But despite that, most of the characters are quite bad shaped in terms of character sheets. They also don't really mind much consistency, seeing how that shy girl doesn't dare to speak even to the brother of her best friend in one episode, yet in the next episode she talks to him like it's the most common thing in the world.

Enjoyment:

If I said I'd enjoyed watching this series, I'd lie. But I have to admit that the series took turns for the better and actually managed to surprise me at times where it made a 180-degrees turn. From sappy comedy to disturbing incestual issues, to mind-playing tricks, to flat out parody-comedy, it has it all. While the border between those is sometimes missing, all of them work well. If only they would have used characters more fitting for those genres, it would've become better, but due to the big-breasted, trying-to-look-cute characters it doesn't really get beyond the ‘I don't really have a clue what we're making here’-phase.

Here's an anime that is so mediocre that it will probably fade from your memory very fast. It is not what I would call really bad, it is just so forgettably mainstream.

A short plot summary: We have Aruto who is a big fan of the two Alice stories, in fact he's such a big fan that he's writing his own Alice book. He also dreams about Alice so he knows what she looks like. One night she passes by his window, he tracks her down and finds her fighting another girl. Upon winning, she tears out a page from a book hidden inside the chest or the heart of the other girl. Alice's name is actually Arisu. She tells him that by collecting all existing story fragments, the third volume "Eternal Alice" can be created which will grant the owner any wish. They quickly team up since Aruto is also very interested in this third volume.

Of course this isn't everything there is to the plot. You get the feeling however that tracking down these story fragments, battling to obtain them and completing the third volume will be an essential part of the show, but that is unfortunately not the case. We are explained early on that the girls will be fighting each other after being invited to a "tea party", but most of the time the battles will just start without any notice whatsoever. The characters can be walking in the middle of the street one second, and the very next frame they will be flying around in the sky battling whatever "Seeker of Alice" pops us that day. 10 seconds later the story will then change back to more yuri-tendencies or brother-complex drama, which is an essential flaw in the anime. The main focus is too often on heavily overdramatized situations between Aruto, his sister and Arisu. The other seekers are never properly introduced which leaves you with a feeling that you don't give a damn about what's going on.

For my taste there is just a bit too much Rozen Maiden material: We have the girls fighting over something hidden inside one another and we've got the "Alice." Later on the story will become a little more unpredictable and complicated, but even then, it borrows heavily from other shows I've watched, such as Princess Tutu. Overall the story gets sidetracked too much from the main plot, and I think the creators overcompensated in the last few episodes. Everything got really messy and they deployed a "shocking" ending, but still in a child-friendly sort of way. Confused? Good, because that's also the awkward feeling you get from actually watching the show.

The story ends at episode 12, but there is also a 13th episode, which is there because...err well obviously they signed up for thirteen. It feels more like a "special" or one of those x.5 episodes that don't contribute to the plot at all. At least the remaining girls from the ending video will have their appearances!

Animation: The males look very feminine and the girls have giant eyes and big hairdos. I think of this style of animation as very fitting for a kid's fantasy/mahou shoujo anime. It's the kind of animation that only lets you distinguish between the characters by their hair-do and hair/eye color. Equally unimpressive is the general background animation, it lacks in detail, depth and coloring. It also lacks in something that only the high-budget shows manage to pull off: movement. Apart from a character talking and moving his/her lips in an unsynchronized way or a person walking down the street, most pictures are completely motionless. The reason why I'm so picky about this is that I also just watched Kamichu! which is on a totally different animation level, it excels in all areas I just mentioned.

Sound: There are a couple of good voice actors that keep the sound score on a decent level. Ai Shimizu, best known as Mikoto from Mai Hime/Otome plays the role of Arisu. There is also Tomoko Kaneda known from her performance as Chiyo in Azumanga Daioh. Both the OP and ED are pretty lousy tracks that you're likely to skip after the first time. It's obvious that those tracks were only created for the anime, very little effort and musical skills are put into them. The sound effects are clearly created on a computer, they are unrealistic and repetitive. They make the battles feel even more dull.

Character: We have the usual harem protagonist here. Aruto is nerdy, scrawny and possesses absolutely no fascinating character traits. He needs a haircut too. Still, he somehow acts as a chick magnet, they practically flock around him. The other feature is of course that he wants to protect everyone from harm, even the opponents! Then there is Arisu, the girl from Aruto's dreams. She plays the role of the potential girlfriend. We've also got the jealous girl, Kiraha. The twist here is that she's Aruto's brother, incest ftw! It's not very realistic, but perhaps some people out there will like it. There are 4-5 other girls that get involved with Aruto one way or another, so the perfect harem is hereby established. There isn't much character development. Even though there is alot of focus on certain characters' emotions, they remain rather static until the very end. It's only in the last two episodes when the story spins a little out of control that the characters have to adapt to the changes. You cannot really call this character development.

Value/enjoyment: Again, Eternal Alice was a very forgettable experience. It's one of those shows that by the end of each episode, will have you count how many there are left. "Ah that was episode 8, only 5 left then. That's less than 2 hours if I skip the opening and ending, great!" I'm most certainly never gonna watch this anime again, it never managed to excite me just one bit. I remember in the first one or two episodes I was thinking a bit about the usual things: How are these girls connected? What happens to them after the battles? Who's behind all this? However quickly the show presented its boring, superficial and side-tracked story so I just wanted the thing to end.

Most people should stay away from this title and the otakus should only watch if they are interested in a cheap Rozen Maiden or Princess Tutu ripoff.