Western influences in Japanese visual culture are pretty commonplace. We've got Shakespeare in our Kurosawa films, Tom & Jerry in our One Piece, outright anime adaptations of popular Marvel Comics series, numerous animated adaptations of classic western literature over the decades, manga Mein Kampf, Beck, and now Alice in Wonderland. Sort of.

Remember how Evangelion stirred up controversy by filling itself with religious references, but most of them didn't amount to any kind of meaningful commentary or reflection on Christian mythology? Pandora Hearts is pretty much that, but with Lewis Carroll instead of angel names. Beneath that lies a show that's neither great nor unwatchable. That's right...lukewarm territory.

Let's talk plot. Oz Vessalius — no, not a wizard — is turning fifteen. As heir to the Vessalius Dukedom, life seems pretty sweet. Sure, his mom's dead and his dad basically hates him, but someday he's gonna be a duke! With his coming-of-age ceremony coming up, it's time to party like it's sort-of Victorian England! Or at least, like it's an indeterminate European setting in an indeterminate time period, and also everyone speaks Japanese. While hanging out with his little sister, Ada, and his best friend/servant, Gil, Oz just happens to fall into a hole — not a rabbit hole, mind you, but there's a grave down there. On that grave is a pocket watch which transports Oz into a creepy doll-filled room where a psychotic girl tries to strangle him. That is one kinky start to a birthday party. Most fifteen-year-olds just choke themselves for fun these days, so it's obvious the party was somewhere else back then.

After that fun little near-asphyxiating rendezvous, Oz goes to his ceremony, meets a cute girl from the Rainsworth Dukedom and her weird servant, then a bunch of cloaked people show up and drop him into hell. The operative theme here is something to the effect of, "Fuck you, kid." This hell is none other than the surreal underworld known as Abyss, populated by monsters known as Chains — perhaps because they're chained to this other world. Normally, Chains try to bond with humans so they can escape Abyss and eat a bunch of people in our world to get more powerful. In Oz's case, the Chains he encounters, which mostly look like dolls and big stuffed animals designed by Ed Gein, are more interested in eating him. Let's make that "Double-fuck you, kid."

All seems lost until an unusually human chain named Alice, taking the guise of a young girl, shows up and saves Oz's sorry ass. After he binges on some conveniently located cookies and the two go through a little peril together, Oz agrees to become her Contractor and the two escape back to the human world. Of course, this is after Alice transforms into her scythe-wielding giant black rabbit form, in which she's known as "B-Rabbit." Yes, in this aspiring wonderland, Alice and the rabbit are the same character. Try not to think about that too hard.

Back in the human world, ten years have flown by. The young Sharon Rainsworth hasn't aged a day, nor has her one-eyed servant, the eccentric puppeteer Xerxes Break. Keeping his return a secret, the two induct Oz and Alice into Pandora, an Abyss research organization founded by the four dukedoms. After warnings of how overuse of Alice's powers could drop Oz back into Abyss to his death, taking Alice with him, the two set off in search of Alice's missing memories in the company of Raven, a young adult who suspiciously resembles the previously-wounded Gil. Chains wreak havoc, the very consciousness of Abyss itself starts meddling in a trippy manner, and by the end of this first set, Cheshire Cat shows up to let you guys know: this catboy's got some claws.

Yes, Pandora Hearts is a very easy show to make fun of. That said, there's worse out there. Following Mike's tweet-review of the first episode and viewing the opening online, I was dreading the possibility of some sort of Le Portrait Petit Cossette/Nabari no Ou fusion. The former was one of the most abominably unwatchable shows I deeply regret ever subjecting myself to. The latter was just pain, as you can easily see for yourself on this site. The worst I can call Pandora Hearts so far is tepid. If you stripped away the thin veneer of Lewis Carroll references, you'd end up with a show that'd be hard to sell anyone on — any experienced anime fan would find themselves wondering, "Haven't I seen this before?"

Like Nabari no Ou, the show has a painful tendency to run headfirst into melodramatic territory — a cringeworthy sin committed by far too many shows. But unlike Nabari, Pandora Hearts is often light-hearted and silly enough to be legitimately enjoyable — in the least, enough so that you don't want to kill any of its characters with a hammer. While the show usually isn't anywhere near as funny as it thinks it is, it does have a few moments where I chuckled — including a particular cookie-based scene in the third episode. The show also isn't nearly as dark as it wants to think it is, either, but after the gothic lolita autoerotic asphyxiation trainwreck that was Petit Cossette, this is a good thing.

As the characters go, none are outstanding, but all are likable enough. Oz is basically what Nabari's Miharu tried to be and failed due to godawful character writing: a mischievous young boy with a dark past. I wouldn't put him in the pantheon of great anime leads, but he works well enough. Alice is your typical tsundere — a tough girl with a soft side — but she's a functional foil for Oz and the rest of the cast. Gil's sympathetic as a kid and grows up to pretty much become a tired brooding bishounen trope, but the sympathy he establishes as a kid carries over. Sharon's a likable but boring bishoujo trope — the gentle, beautiful girl with her own agenda. And Break does a good job making the rest of the cast uncomfortable at every turn. He's probably the most interesting character in the main cast, though he's a little grating at times, too.

What do these characters have in common? Virtually all of them have the same basic center-forehead bangs, nearly identically. A little more variation in character design might not have killed them. That said, at least some of the characters, like Oz's uncle Oscar, actually defy this by not looking like a trendy kid out of some recent Japanese fashion magazine.

Genre-wise, Pandora Hearts has a real mishmash going on. A lot of the time, it's a fairly straightforward shounen action/comedy show. Then it turns up the melodrama to eleven and occasionally steps into psychological thriller territory — almost borderline horror, but it's never really frightening. There's some plays within character dialogue that hint at the show also wanting to be a detective show, but it isn't in any meaningful sense. There's no investigation or deduction, just "Oh, we head this way to look for Alice's next memory." Fusing all these cross-genre elements together, they make up something watchable and at times entertaining, but largely unremarkable.

Musically, Pandora Hearts does all right. The opening's a Fiction Junction song, "Parallel Hearts." It's not their most memorable song, but it's certainly not bad, either. The opening animation itself feels kind of long to me, but it portrays what the show's about well enough, though the pocket watch imagery is central in both that and the closing, when the watch itself was merely used as a plot device early on and forgotten about in later episodes in this first set. Whether it will return to plot significance remains to be seen. The ending is "Maze," a song by Savage Genius featuring Tomoe Omi. I can't really call the song a work of savage genius, myself, as I can't even remember it upon writing this. It serves its purpose well enough as a closing, but frankly neither the show's opening nor closing is something that's stayed with me. The background music by Yuki Kajiura isn't altogether memorable either, though it's recognizably her style. It works for what it is.

As my first NIS America release I'm reviewing, I'd have to say they've done a solid job. The subtitles do their job, and speaking as someone who doesn't watch dubs, the lack of an English language audio track isn't missed. The basic menus are simple and attractive by design — nothing less than completely functional. I do think the choice to jump straight into the show with the subs off instead of taking you to the menu before anything else was a bit of an odd one to make. The first set also includes some fun extras: particularly, a series of shorts where the characters spoof a variety of anime genre clichés from detective show parody to high school dramedy and more. There's even some self-aware humor about the show's by-the-book bishounen and bishoujo character designs and slash fanfic appeal, which is much more entertaining than the completely serious approach Nabari took to any hint of boys'-love. And they really slathered in to the point of minimizing everything else by the end of that show. I'm not in the target audience for that sort of content, but I can appreciate the difference between good and bad executions of that kind of writing.

So far, in a sense, Pandora Hearts has been a pleasant surprise. I went in expecting something painful, and what I got in return was much better than that. I'd just be hard-pressed to call it good, let alone great. Depending on your personal, subjective taste in anime, your mileage will vary with this show, and so far in this first half, it really hasn't done it for me. There's much worse out there, but you can do much better than this, too.

Ed note: Thanks go out to NIS America for the review copy.