I’ve recently – after enjoying both Summer Days with Coo and Miss Hokusai – become a fan of director Keiichi Hara. Hara comes from a deep background in animation, having worked for years on influential Japanese shows such as Doraemon and Crayon Shin-chan.

He now has five feature films under his belt as director, so I was looking forward to checking out his latest, 2019’s The Wonderland, which was just released on Blu-ray (and digital) by Shout! Factory and Eleven Arts.

Based on a children’s book by Sachiko Kashiwaba, The Wonderland focuses on Akane, a middle schooler who meets a mysterious alchemist in her aunt’s curio shop and gets led to a parallel world where she’s considered the Goddess of the Green Wind and destined to save the prince, bring back the rain to a parched world, and defeat the evil Zan-Gu.

The Wonderland certainly doesn’t lack for compelling visuals. Indeed, the film is flat-out gorgeous and has some of the most spectacular settings and backgrounds I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a visual feast.

However, the story and characters just don’t measure up to the visuals. The synopsis above might sound unique – and aspects of it are definitely original – but it just feels… flat.

There are scenes that don’t seem to connect; elaborate events occur for little reason other than to set up another scene; late-movie events and characters contradict early-movie events and characters; and the climax sees a character do a complete 180 in a matter of seconds.

There are also a couple scenes that unnecessarily sexualize young Akane for absolutely no reason. (Remember, she’s only about 13 or 14.)

Though Keiicha Hara forged his own path in his previous films, it feels like he fell into the trap here of trying to emulate the magic of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. It’s easy to do, and I also recognize that it’s even easier for Western audiences to claim that Japanese animated films “feel like Ghibli.”

I know that’s often meant as a compliment, but it often comes from a place of ignorance about the industry as a whole. Still, The Wonderland has scenes and sequences that are ripped almost straight out of The Cat Returns and Howl’s Moving Castle.

And even though some recent films have been able to emulate the Ghibli magic of the late 80s and 90s (I’m looking at you A Letter to Momo), The Wonderland – despite its sumptuous visuals – unfortunately feels like a pale comparison.

The new Blu-ray release from Shout! Factory includes both the original Japanese and English dub versions of the film, along with an audio commentary (with character designer and concept artist Ilya Kuvshinov and Eleven Arts’ Chris Platt and Amelie Khuat), a cast interview featurette, and “Mayu Matsuoka’s Amazing Adventure.”