Review: ALICE THE 101ST

Of course, there are plenty of shojo titles about schools (and music schools in particular), but few of them are as messy as this one.

ALICE THE 101ST (101 Hitome no Alice), by Chigusa Kawai.  First published in 2007 and first published in North America in 2010.

PLOT:

There is no academy that can compare with the Mondonville School of Music.  Only the most talented kids are admitted, and only 100 students are admitted each year.  That's why everyone is surprised when there's an extra boy on this year's list by the name of Aristide Lang.

Aristide (nicknamed "Alice") comes from a long line of violinists, and while he's got an incredible ear for music he struggles with actually playing and the formality of the school's curriculum and students.  This combined with his short stature and pretty face makes him a target for bullies like Richard de Diamant, the wealthy second chair violinist who sees his place in the school as his birthright.  He doesn't understand why his late grandfather insisted that he come to this school, but Aristide is willing to work hard, make friends, hone his skills, and prove his worth.

STORY:

Much like the title character, Alice the 101st is an odd duck.  There's a lot of familiar ideas here, but they're assembled in such a scattershot, melodramatic way that it's hard to get a pin on what kind of tone it's trying to set.

Maybe that's because Aristide himself is all over the place as a character.  It's like he's barely socialized, considering how naive, willful, and prone to outbursts he is.  Yet he's also some sort of savant, a boy who can play a violin beautifully by ear but struggles with even the basics of sight-reading a score.  I almost want to call him a manic pixie dream boy, but he's mostly there to figure out his own past and not to help someone else.  That's probably for the best because the rest of the cast around him are pretty bland.  His allies are pleasant and unremarkable, while his antagonists (teacher and student alike) are cold, snooty, inflexible, and focused more on status than love of the art.

Alice the 101st is not a BL, but it's clearly toying with some ideas from the genre.  The most obvious one is Victor, a viola player and student supervisor who routinely flirts on Aristide.  You could argue that Aristide himself is pretty uke-coded, with his tininess, androgynous good looks, and wild mood swings.  That said, this is set at a co-ed school and Kawai doesn't seem to commit to the idea beyond using Victor as the queer-coded comic relief.  

Otherwise it seems to be following a lot of tried-and-true dramatic storylines, albeit in the most melodramatic matter possible.  Sometime's it's a quest for identity, as Aristide came to the school in the first place because his (absent, now dead) violinist father trained there and one of the professors (who is conveniently absent) was a family friend.  This evolves into a curious sort of rivalry storyline, as to get access to his father's violin Aristide would need to become a better player than the school's current top chair in violin.  Kawai seems to be throwing ideas at the metaphorical wall throughout this volume, and it's only toward the very end of it that they find some focus.  The real question is how many people will be patient enough to get to that point?

ART:

There's a fussiness to Kawai's character designs that I don't care for.  While their figures are drawn well enough (with obvious care given to their performances), there's something I find weirdly off-putting about their faces.  I think it's due to how angular and squared-off their eyes are.  It also doesn't help that Kawai keeps trying to drawn their faces from odd perspectives that make their features look more squashed than they should be.  They keep the panels pretty tightly focused on them too, so there's little in the way of visual relief.  Because of this, they also don't do much with the backgrounds.  I'll also admit to not liking the digitally colored art on the cover, which is clearly aiming for 'soft' but looks more smeary than anything else.  This may be a shojo manga (it ran in Wings) but I wouldn't call it a particularly pretty one.

RATING:

Alice the 101st is trying to find its own identity as a manga alongside its protagonist and the end result is less than harmonious.  Much like Aristide's teachers, I want it to settle down a little and to focus on improving its essentials (mostly the character writing) so that it can become the best possible version of whatever it's trying to be.

This manga was published by Digital Manga Publishing.  This series is complete in Japan with 9 volumes.  4 volumes were released and are currently out of print.