Alice au pays des merveilles

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.

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.

I think this is the closest thing to a "trip" I've ever experienced on film - at times it's a positively surreal interpretation of Lewis Carroll's nonsense story of "Alice" (Carol Marsh) and her adventures having fallen down the rabbit hole. Unlike the colourful, but much fluffier Disney adaptation that followed in 1951, this is a more sophisticated, clever and intricate hybrid of real life characters married with some basic, but engaging, stop-motion animation as she encounters the "Mad Hatter"; "Cheshire Cat"; 'Ugly Duchess" and, of course, the brutally minded "Queen of Hearts" (voiced here excellently by Pamela Brown). I'm not really a fan of the story, and sadly although an undoubtedly creatively accomplished effort from Dallas Bower and Irving Block, this doesn't really do much to sustain my interest. The pace is suitably frenetic, but Marsh is pretty flat in the title role, and the innovative effects of the production start to war thin quickly leaving us with little better than a semi-animated farce of a film. If you enjoyed the wackiness of Carroll's original book, then you may well get more from this than I did, but I'm afraid it was all just too silly for me, sorry.

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.

After almost half a century, Lewis Carroll's, Alice in Wonderland, has had a bumpy road, when it comes to theatrical motion picture adaptations. Even the audiences from the classic era of film weren't too crazy with the costumes and special effects, that were being utilized in these films. They felt that this kind of a story could never be adapted well into a motion picture. Silent films had the toughest job telling this story, because a lot of the plot in Alice in Wonderland is driven by dialogue. The audiences needed sound. Then the sound versions came out and those versions didn't do well either, because audiences still weren't buying the story of Alice with the technical problems still being there. The best of the classic Alice films is Alice in Wonderland (1933) and the audiences of the day didn't go see it. So, next comes color film and how did Alice's story do with that?

This new version (for 1949), had color and was produced in France. Up to this point, the film adaptations were all American or British productions. Maybe the French could do a better job this time. What if, they went with something other than costumes for this one. With so much rejection coming from the audiences of the past, about the odd characters in Wonderland, never looking believable, the idea for this film was to use stop-motion photography, to make the characters more authentic to the source material. The French filmmakers than added in more music interludes to the film and created a prologue, which involves Alice having a dream about Wonderland. She is just dreaming of a story, that her friend, Lewis Carroll (Stephen Murray), is telling her. Yes, this is the first adaptation, that includes Wonderland author, Lewis Carroll as a character. This is another interesting change to this story.

In Alice's dream, she substitutes the characters in the live-action Oxford part of the film with the stop-motion characters in Wonderland. This film has the same problem, that Alice in Wonderland (1931), had, in which, the Alice actress was twenty years old, playing a character, that is supposed to be, barely ten years old. This film works better in that regard, because the costume, hair and make-up works better here, than the 1931 film did. As long as there aren't too many close-ups of her, to give it away, the full-packaged performance does work. I mean, really, that is what acting is all about I guess. Being able to execute a character, no matter what kind, is the whole point of acting. Anyway, the 1931 depiction of Alice was bad, but the age problem doesn't really effect the quality of this film.

The problem with this film comes from the special effects themselves. It isn't the stop-motion that is the problem, so much as the matting, choice of effects and the practical analogue effects, they had at their disposal, compared to the budget they had. This wasn't a huge Hollywood production, that utilized the best equipment on the market. It was an international picture, who's film industry didn't have as much cash as Hollywood, so the special effects used in this film, look more like effects from the 1930s. Again, the stop-motion effects used in Alice in Wonderland (1949), by pioneering, stop-motion artist, Lou Bunin, is fine in this movie. It is the other effects in the movie that are the problem. Stop-motion photography was huge in the late 1940s and 1950s. It was one of the more preferred means of doing creature effects in films of the time period. The legendary Ray Harryhausen was hitting his stride at this point and Willis O'Brien had just released Mighty Joe Young (1949). Stop-motion was king at this time. Lou Bunin does a nice job with Alice in Wonderland (1949), especially in the climactic scene with the Lobsters. It is a very good depiction of what that scene would look like, especially compared to the previous adaptations of this book. It made perfect sense to use stop-motion effects.

This film has its problems, mostly related to a grittiness, that doesn't translate well into a vision of being very polished. The story, editing and pace does jump around a little too much. The version of this film I saw was a poorly pixilated, VHS version of the American release. After I watched the American version, I found the French version, but unfortunately the French language version came without English subtitles, but was of a much higher quality. It must have come from a DVD quality print. So, I skipped through the French version and I saw what I was looking for. The higher quality version does improve the qualify of the overall film and the special effects. It helps show the excellent detail of the stop-motion characters that Lou Bunin used. The Lobsters look much better in their pivotal scene. So, try and find the highest quality you can out there, because this film may not be great, but it isn't terrible either. It is a fair effort towards, what has been a difficult story to tell in cinema. It needs 1951 to arrive.

5.4 (D- MyGrade) = 6 IMDB.