Alice in Wonderland

Here's the good, the bad, and the disclaimer. First the good. The movie places Alice in Wonderland in proper context, with a prologue featuring Charles Dodgson as an Oxfordian who is inwardly iconoclastic but no firebrand, and who enjoys the company of innocent girls a generation younger. As the Alice story unfolds, we can see how it provides Dodgson an opportunity to satirize his own environment. The movie makers invent some parallels, but the inventions are benign and well within the spirit of the original. Dodgson, for example, has furtively stolen a tart in the prologue. Perhaps the most successful aspect of the movie is the stylized sets through which Alice roams. They are completely believable as stage scenery, while on the other hand they can easily accommodate the stop-motion puppets who play the Wonderland characters, so that they smoothly mediate between the natural and the artificial. What's bad about the movie is that the puppets are mostly crude and offputting in their design and movement. If I hadn't seen the year cited here on IMDb, I would have pegged the movie a good decade and a half earlier-- also because of the badly dated music. But the disclaimer I must provide is that the print I saw may not do justice to the movie. It had no color, the sound was less than perfectly synchronized, and the picture was not very sharp. Maybe a good color print would have looked more pleasant and up-to-date.

Better known for being suppressed by Disney to protect their 1951 production, this co-French/British production is surprisingly successful at capturing Carroll's logical nonsense. A prologue with author Dodson/Carroll, Alice and her sisters, and a visit by Queen Victoria (splendidly played by Pamela Brown) sets up amusing "clues," a la the Kansas scenes in THE WIZARD OF OZ.

The main story is told with a live Alice moving through painted sets and wonderful pixilated puppets. There's real eccentric charm and fun in many of the sequences, the fish-footmen are particularly funny with a Gilbert & Sullivan style number to match. Sadly, the "Ansco" color has apparently gone to rack and ruin, but the intentions can at least still be seen. Still, it comes closer to an acceptable Carroll then most adaptations.

This version of Alice in Wonderland tries to tell us how Lewis Carroll came to create the characters he did. After a very British beginning, he tells the story of the young girl to some young girls. Of course, it starts with the trip into the rabbit hole. Alice follows, carelessly, running willy nilly through brightly decorated caverns. She has the usual encounters with growing and shrinking, making it hard to get through doors. What follows is quite good. The stop action Wonderland characters are striking. Some are grotesques; some are quite tame. But all of them have been created with thoughtfulness and skill. The story isn't as good as the visuals. I now must confess, that having read this book several times, I can't say I've ever enjoyed it. I think that I should try some critical works and they might assist me in the allegorical features. i did learn about Disney's successful efforts to keep this film out of release to promote his animated piece.

It's a hideous little production, apt to give one nightmares as well as headaches. It's an unsightly blend of live action and ugly stop-motion animation. It's weird, but it's not the kind of fun, weird trip anyone optimistic might expect. It's the cold, inhuman, unfriendly, sickening, even creepy kind of weird. There is absolutely no reason to watch this movie. After all, Disney did a fantastic job with the same source material. And Cosgrove-Hall did far more attractive things with stop-motion.

Interestingly, this is a French production. As such, it re-enforces the stereotype that the French have no concept of scary.

This version of 'Alice in Wonderland' (a co-production between the UK and France) suffered from being released around the same time as the Disney cartoon with little advertising; and through being suppressed from release in the UK due to the portrayal of Queen Victoria in the early pre-fantasy scenes.

It was also filmed in Ansocolor, a process which has not travelled well if the print in the archives is anything to go by. Carol Marsh is an OK Alice, but looks older than she should be - the puppets are mainly hideous and would be frightening to children (especially the Mock Turtle, the Duchess, and the Mouse Alice encounters in the lake of tears). I did like the footmen-fish however and the combination of live action with puppet work, if a bit creaky, does have charm.

At the start of the film, we meet the dons of Oxford and the Queen (the Vice-Chancellor then becomes the White Rabbit, the Queen is the Queen of Hearts, with the same actors providing the voices). The switch into the 'Wonderland' story proper comes with a boat trip in which the stuttering Dodgson entertains the Liddel girls to compensate from them missing the visit of the Queen to Oxford.

There is much to enjoy in this film - the score is good, if a little saccharine, the puppets are memorable (although one or two, especially the Caterpillar, compare unfavourably with their Disney counterparts), and the story still has charm. There is also enough humour to entertain adult audiences while the main story enthrals their children. Recommended, if hard to track down these days.