General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Wonderland (バースデー・ワンダーランド)

The Wonderland (バースデー・ワンダーランド, Bāsudē Wandārando, also released as Birthday Wonderland) is a 2019 Japanese animated fantasy film directed by Keiichi Hara and produced by the studio Signal MD, adapting the children's fantasy novel Strange Journey From The Basement (地下室からのふしぎな旅) by Sachiko Kashiwaba.¹ It follows Akane, a girl with little self-confidence who, on the eve of her birthday, is pulled through a door in an antique shop's basement into a colorful other world that is losing its color, and who is pressed into service as that world's savior.² The film opened in Japanese theaters on April 26, 2019, distributed by Warner Bros. Japan, with a running time of 115 minutes.¹

Key fact	Detail
Japanese title / English titles	バースデー・ワンダーランド; released internationally as The Wonderland, also known as Birthday Wonderland¹^•³
Director / studio	Keiichi Hara; animation by Signal MD¹
Source	Sachiko Kashiwaba's children's fantasy Strange Journey From The Basement (Kodansha Aoi Tori Bunko)²
Release	April 26, 2019, Warner Bros. Japan; 115 minutes¹
Festival	Official selection, feature film competition, Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2019¹
Main voice cast	Mayu Matsuoka (Akane), Anne (Chii), Kumiko Aso (Midori), Masachika Ichimura (Hippocrates), Nao Tōyama (Pipo)²^•⁴
Character and visual design	Russian illustrator Ilya Kuvshinov⁵

Spoilers

Story

The day before her birthday, Akane, a junior high school student who lacks confidence in herself, visits the shop of Chi, her mother's free-spirited friend, to collect her present.⁶ A man in a suit suddenly appears in the shop's unused basement: Hippocrates, a great alchemist from "the neighboring world," together with his apprentice Pipo, who beg Akane to help save their world.¹^•² Through a door in the basement the two are pulled into a Wonderland filled with happy colors, inhabited by strange animals and people, where the color is beginning to disappear.² Akane is treated as the world's savior and sets out on an adventure whose outcome forces a life-changing decision; the film frames the journey, and the painful parting it brings, as a small story of growth in which Akane gains the courage to take a first step.²^•¹

The antagonist is Zan Gu, voiced by Keiji Fujiwara, with Doropo voiced by Akiko Yajima; the quartet's journey carries them through a sandstorm, underwater travel, a scorching desert, and snowy winter landscapes.⁴^•⁷

Production

Signal MD, a company mainly planning and producing family-oriented animation, developed the film as an adaptation of Kashiwaba's fantasy, adding original elements from director Keiichi Hara, known for Summer Days with Coo, Colorful, and Miss Hokusai; it was his first full-scale fantasy work.¹ Production ran from April 2017 to February 2019 through storyboarding, drawing, and post-production, with the first complete screening on February 15, 2019.¹ The project received a subsidy of 20,000 thousand yen (20 million yen), which the studio said allowed it to secure more staff than on its other productions and raise the work's quality.¹

Design. Hara chose the Russian illustrator Ilya Kuvshinov for character design after seeing his art book, and as work progressed Kuvshinov's role expanded to the whole visual world, including village buildings, machinery, and props, producing what Hara described as a vast body of setting art that exceeded his requests.⁵ Hara said he had wanted a non-Japanese sensibility in the design and deliberately drew on Kuvshinov's Russian upbringing; Kuvshinov, who says he loves Japanese games and anime and now lives in Japan, was working on an anime production for the first time.⁸^•⁹ At a pre-release event Hara recounted that he had assumed the unusual pen name belonged to a Japanese person before learning the artist was a young Russian.¹⁰

Casting. Hara cast actors rather than professional voice performers in the leading roles: Mayu Matsuoka as Akane, Anne as Chii, Kumiko Aso as Akane's mother Midori, and Masachika Ichimura as Hippocrates.¹ In an interview he discussed his reasoning for this casting approach.⁵ The screenplay was by Miho Maruo, with music by Harumi Fuuki, editing by Shigeru Nishiyama, and art direction by Takashi Nakamura; the film was produced by Fuji Television Network with Signal MD.¹¹^•³ The image song "Wonderland" and theme song "The Show" were performed by milet.¹²

Release and reception

Warner Bros. Japan opened the film nationwide on April 26, 2019, with the Marunouchi Piccadilly as its head theater.¹^•¹¹ It was an official entry in the feature film competition of the 2019 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, which the studio cited as both a demonstration of the quality of Japanese animated film and an opportunity to reach audiences across borders.¹

Critical response. Reviewers generally praised the visuals while dividing over the story. Screen Daily's Allan Hunter, reviewing at Annecy, called it entertaining and often eye-catching but found the meandering, over-complicated plot a challenge for some family audiences, and noted the film's debt to Alice in Wonderland alongside elements recalling The Wizard of Oz, Beauty and the Beast, and the Sword in the Stone legend.³ The Japan Times's Matt Schley observed that Kashiwaba's admirers include Hayao Miyazaki, whose Spirited Away is said to have been at least loosely inspired by one of her books, and judged the film charming on its surface while questioning whether it achieved true wonder.⁶ A German review credited the character designs and the work of Signal MD while finding the film short of the emotional depth of Miyazaki's heroines, rating it 7 of 10.¹³ On the Japanese review aggregator Eiga.com the film held a user score of 2.8 out of 5 across 105 reviews, with several reviewers criticizing the mismatch between the child protagonist's characterization and the adult actors' voices, while crediting Nao Tōyama, voice of Pipo, as a standout.⁹

Hara himself called the result an intellectually engaging fantasy entertainment film and a fresh experience even for a director with his career record.¹⁴

Context in Kashiwaba's work and Hara's career

Sachiko Kashiwaba is described in Japanese coverage as a popular author of fantasy for young readers, and the source novel was published in Kodansha's Aoi Tori Bunko line for children.¹^•² For Hara, who worked for years on the Crayon Shin-chan and Doraemon television franchises before moving to independent features, the film marked a deliberate turn: he said he had previously had little interest in fantasy, took it on as entertainment first, and enjoyed the genre's freedom, in which any kind of world can be made to hold, and he consciously aimed to give audiences a visually satisfying, colorful experience.⁵^•⁸ He also said that unlike his adaptations of existing popular characters, this film was built from an original scenario, and that he set out to keep the audience entertained for the entire running time.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Animated and short films › Japanese anime features › Released 2014 to 2026

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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