“Still she haunts me, phantomwise,

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes.” -Lewis Carroll, from “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There”

If you find yourself unable to process information, does it haunt you?

The first episode of Kyousogiga – formerly an original net animation before the more recent 13-episode series – opens with the above Lewis Carroll poem from “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.” It’s an interesting choice when one considers the poem within the context of Charles “Lewis Carroll” Dodgson, and the woman who was presumably the “real-life” Alice, Alice Liddell. The entire poem itself is an acrostic, spelling out Alice Pleasance Liddell. Additionally, the poem is specifically placed at the end of “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There” rather than its predecessor, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” It is rumored that Carroll had a falling out with the Liddell Family, to which Alice belonged, in between “Adventures” and “Looking Glass,” and the poem wistfully looks back on the days when Carroll would take Alice and her sisters on rowboat outings. On one such trip, the story of the “Alice” books was presumably conceived when Alice Liddell asked Carroll to entertain her and her two sisters.

There are a multitude of visual parallels between Kyousogiga and “Alice” beginning with the series’ focus on chessboard imagery, a nod to “Through the Looking Glass” where Alice finds that her garden has been transformed into a chessboard with bodies of water signifying the separation between squares. Alice is promised to be made a queen if she can progress a certain number of squares on the board. Additionally, the entirety of the “Alice” prose is arguably the most famous version of literary nonsense in existence. Literary nonsense plays on our natural human thirst for knowledge and to logically order things by placing words, images, and the like in a nonsensical presentation or order, leaving our poor minds hopelessly confused. We constantly desire to find meaning in all things, whether or not they mean anything at all.

Oddly enough, one would only know this while watching Kyousogiga if one had either studied Lewis Carroll and the “Alice” books at some point in their life, or been bothered enough following this episode to find the source of the poem. Both imply, at the very least, a thirst for knowledge outside of the hints that the series provides. Lewis Carroll is somewhat of a fascination for some – with entire societies dedicated to examining his life – as so many things about the man remain a mystery. The nature of his relationship with the aforementioned Alice Liddell, for example, and whether she was The Alice or simply an Alice, is a point that remains hotly debated among Carroll scholars. In an odd way, the contrary nature of the discourse surrounding Carroll’s personal life mirrors the discourse of his literature, with any and all parties desperately trying to make sense of it.

As previously mentioned, Kyousogiga contains direct references to “Alice;” however, the presentation of its imagery also mimics Carroll’s writing style through its nonstop assault on your senses. Colors, movement, use of negative space, positioning, and individual frames all rapidly assail the viewer, daring them to comprehend it. Additionally, there is the nature of any viewer who has read, or seen, any of “Alice” to make an attempt at finding direct references between Kyousogiga and Carroll’s tale. Who is the rabbit? Are the brothers Tweedledum and Tweedledee? Is Kyousogiga’s heroine, Koto, also Lady Koto, goddess of Kyoto? These sentiments bring us back to the initial question posed at the beginning of this post: If you find yourself unable to process information, does it haunt you?

Fortunately, even if your answer to this question is, “Yes,” Kyousogiga offers, along with the “Alice” books, an answer: let the visuals and prose, respectively, wash over you, and then choose your own meaning.

“Ever drifting down the stream —

Lingering in the golden gleam —

Life, what is it but a dream?” -Lewis Carroll, from “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There”