Alice au pays des merveilles

When I was six, I had my tonsils out. The anaesthetist used ether and I hallucinated. My mother had bought me two comic books. One was Krazy Kat and the other the Disney "Alice in Wonderland." If you wanted something to set you up for delirium try those on for size. When I finally saw the movie, I was reminded of those subconscious images. This is an excellent animated film. I love its hard edge and portrayal of Lewis Carol's characters. It also features some wonderful songs. The Queen of Hearts is maniacal and the Mad Hatter diabolical. All the images of random craziness are in here, brought to life with artistic skill, making them unforgettable images.

For material that does not lend itself very easily to cinema, this is a pretty good adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland" with some enjoyable characters and sequences. It succeeds, at least in a basic way, in capturing part of the manic but imaginative nature of Lewis Carroll's story.

Much of the language, poetry, and ideas that make the original story so captivating cannot really be conveyed very easily in a movie, and so it would be nearly impossible for any cinema version of Alice to be completely satisfying to those who love the book. Instead, this version simply tries to make the characters come to life, and to use the animation to recreate the feel, if not the depth, of Alice's experience.

The animation drives most of the movie, and at times it is pretty imaginative. Some of the voices work very well, too, with the likes of Ed Wynn and Sterling Holloway fitting the animated characters quite well.

Carroll's stories are so enchanting and creative that it is no surprise that there have been so many efforts through the years to capture the magic of the Alice stories on film. None of the cinema versions has yet come close to matching the books, yet the material itself has made most of them worth watching. In this one, the overall production has a definite Disney style to it, which makes it different from the original, but as a movie it works pretty well.

Disney has a knack for enlightening children to tales from centuries ago by animating them, adding some songs and making everything pretty and colourful, Alice In Wonderland is that and a whole lot more.

Learning about Literary Classics from Disney cartoons is the most convenient, entertaining and wildly amusing ways of seeing what an author had intended the viewer to create in their mind. But nowadays, thanks to television, children can hardly get past the first sentence of a book without wanting a Pikachu or some sort of explosion to take place.

That's where the magic of Disney films come in. The animators, imagineers, musicians and creators take massive pride in the making of their literary classics to Disney masterpieces and Alice In Wonderland is a prime example.

The story of young Alice toppling down a rabbit hole and meeting a bunch of locals in the magical world of Wonderland is created perfectly through this Disney adaptation. Taking aspects from both the original Alice and Through The Looking Glass, the exploits of Tweedledum and Dee to the Mad Hatter's Tea party blend seemlessly in this brilliant animational masterpiece.

The musical score, with each character owning their own theme music, and the various songs throughout are enjoyable and fantastic.

The characters themselves shine, making each and everyone of them memorable especially the talents of Ed Wynn as The Mad Hatter and the brilliant J. Pat O'Malley as the Tweedles and their story telling equivalents.

So, the ideal way to introduce children, or even Highschool Students having to do books from the 19th Century, is to find a Disney Classic such as Alice In Wonderland and marvel at the creative genius behind the team that made books exciting for the new generation.

Alice one day while bored by the riverbank sees a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat and carrying a pocket watch. Out of curiosity Alice follows the rabbit down a rabbit eventually winding up in Wonderland a place of utter ridiculousness inhabited by characters who are stupid, crazy, or both.

Released in 1951, Alice In Wonderland adapted from the books Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Caroll had been a long gestating project as far back to the day's of Disney's Laugh O Gram studios in the 20s where the works loosely inspired Disney's early Alice Comedies. Attempts had been made by Disney to adapt the story to feature length with a preliminary outlines produced prior to the release of Snow White that were ultimately scrapped due to mitigating circumstances. While adaptations of Alice in Wonderland have been made before and since the 1951 Disney film, few, if any, of them have been as well regarded with the Disney version being the most fully realized version of the literary nonsense of Lewis Caroll.

Much like the source material, the story in Alice in Wonderland is less a straightforward narrative and more an excuse to showcase surreal imagery counter balanced against the normality and grounding of Alice who serves as our straight man to nonsense and insanity of Wonderland and its crazed inhabitants. Kathryn Beaumont voices the titular Alice and serves as an effective audience proxy whose down to earth no-nonsense delivery and insatiable curiosity makes her both an effective story engine to move the journey along as well as give the audience a grounding agent to give meaning, purpose, and weight to the surreal encounters of her journey.

Artistically speaking this is Disney's animation at its most unrestrained. Much like Three Caballeros Alice in Wonderland never sits still always keeping itself moving forward to the next bizarre head scratching tangent animated with the intensity of a technicolor fever dream. Unlike Three Caballeros however, the movie wisely gives us a grounding element with Alice and gives breaks in between the more outlandish tangents so the movie never gets exhausting. The animation used to bring Wonderland to life is very striking as Wonderland itself is very dark with many scenes having pitch black or dark black drops that work in contrasting against the purposefully more colorful and energized inhabitants. Every character and encounter stands out be it the petty, jealous, bad tempered Red Queen, the giddy gleeful mania of Mad Hatter and March Hare, or the seeming omnipotent Chesire Cat who's as powerful as he is crazy. Every encounter Alice faces leaves an impression with even the smallest (quite literally in some cases) leaving an impact.

Alice in Wonderland is a classic example of Disney animation and nonsensical story telling perfectly combined into an unforgettable experience. While not Disney's first attempt at feature length narrative nonsense, it's without question the best example of it produced on this scale up to this point and makes welcome viewing for any animation enthusiast.

I was a little worried when I went to watch the film version of Alice In Wonderland, because I just read the novel and Disney has a tendency to dumb down the material that they make into their films with goofball romantic nonsense and cutesy talking animals. While I did get more than the traditional share of talking animals with this film (as well as a variety of other inanimate objects), the film stayed more faithful to the original story than is generally expected from a Disney film. On the other hand, this WAS made in 1951, which makes me wonder what a more modern adaptation would look like.

I read Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass for English 180 (Children's Literature) at the University of California, Davis, so needless to say, I read it with more of a literary appreciation than is generally applied to children's books. I was pleased to see so many of the characters from the second novel in this version of Alice In Wonderland (such as the Cheshire Cat, the talking flowers in the garden, and Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum), although I must admit that I was slightly disappointed to see that Through The Looking Glass has been assimilated into this version of Alice In Wonderland rather than adapted into its own film, which I think is an honor that it certainly deserves.

As far as being a full length feature (although rather short at roughly 75 minutes), however, I think that this movie does justice to both stories, converting them into a single story rather smoothly, and only leaving out things that will only really be missed by people who know the novels enough to be disappointed that certain things were not included. I, for example, would have loved to see the whole chess story in Through The Looking Glass included in the film (there certainly was time for it), where Alice travels through Wonderland on her quest to become a Queen herself, but I am more than happy with how this film turned out.

One of the only things that I noticed about this film that did not match up to the quality of the novels is that the books have so much more in them for adults than the movie does. There are so many tricks with language pulled in the books, such as in the conversations with Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum as well as several other characters, that it really makes you think about the English language as a game with which an endless variety of tricks can be played. In the film, this is hugely downplayed, even if only because it is done visually and the language tricks pass by so fast that kids are almost certain to miss them and even the most attentive of adults will have a hard time keeping up with them.

As a whole, however, Alice In Wonderland is so wildly entertaining that the loss of some of the literary substance does not detract from it as a terrific tale of adventure and discovery, certain to be enjoyed by people of all ages. I have heard plenty of rumors that Lewis Carroll was on any of a variety of drugs while he wrote the novels (and plenty of rumors that he wasn't on any drugs at all), but there are certainly some things in the books and in the movie that could have only been conjured up by the most, um, eccentric of imaginations. We may never know for sure, but at least we have some wonderful entertainment.

Read the books to your kids.