Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Walt Disney had a long working interest in writer/mathematician Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, at least superficially. In the 1920’s he and his brother Roy had found their footing as film makers by making a series of shorts called the Alice Comedies that featured a little girl named Alice who would interact with animated characters and environments, like a primitive Who Framed Roger Rabbit. After the success of Mickey Mouse and the Silly Symphony cartoons, and apparently before the preliminary work on Snow White, he had even considered making a feature length film in accordance with this very same idea but probably abandoned the idea when Paramount Pictures produced a live action Alice in Wonderland in 1933 (a bomb).

According to accounts gathered by Disney historian Neal Gabler, Walt Disney was actually reticent to make a movie based directly on Carroll’s novels but that after Snow White he had been so successful that there were those among the literati that were pressing him (at his polo matches) to make such a film. It was assumed that the literary weight of Carroll’s novels, popular among intellectuals at the time, coupled with Disney’s artistic prowess, also popular among intellectuals at the time, would yield a sure fire masterpiece of some importance. Whatever his personal view of the matter Disney had gone ahead and acquired the rights to the film by 1938, apparently convinced that so popular a “story” ought to be at least attempted. As with many intended Disney projects at the time, the onset of World War II would put the movie on hold for years.

Every exposure I’ve had to the Lewis Carroll’s novels indicates to me that they are essentially grotesque thought experiments about the philosophy of language and logic, an extraordinarily English (and characteristically boring) pastime if there ever was one. However, I’ve seen nothing to indicate to me that in them resides a good story that can be put on the screen. I think that Walt Disney must have agreed with this sentiment and perhaps this is why the final product infamously detracts so much from the spirit of Carroll’s original work, aiming more for artistic expression and good humor over and against intellectual puzzling. Indeed, Disney had often said that he never really wanted to make the movie in the first place and of all of the animated films Disney produced in his lifetime this was the one that he clearly hated the most. Perhaps this was because of how poorly it performed at the box office? Or perhaps he just never really felt much for the literary content he had to work with. I feel his pain. But was it really as bad as Disney claimed? 

If Alice in Wonderland is about anything at all then it is about a young girl, named Alice, who spontaneously follows a white rabbit down a hole which leads her away from a boring history lesson in the park, that she was ignoring, to a series of what I guess can be called close encounters with the bizarre. There isn’t really a story at all, which is part of the problem, but rather just a series of creative, colorful, and often strange vignettes set in a world of nonsense called “wonderland”. Or at least the title indicates that it is a wonderland, I can’t recall anyone in the film saying anything about “wonderland” at all now that I think about it.

Anyway, Alice spends the first half of the movie just trying to find and pin down, for some reason, the anthropomorphized white rabbit that sporadically appears throughout the film only to keep telling her that he is too tardy to talk before he runs away again. The encounters are actually pretty funny. She then chases after him, again without explanation, and proceeds to do a lot of things most people in her circumstance wouldn’t do: consuming strange things that make her a giant, eating things that make her small, confronting tweetle-dee and tweetle-dumb who tell her a pointless story about oysters meant to indicate that there is no point, sitting down for tea with crazy people, and so on. All the while she is strangely, and quite unnaturally undisturbed as she merrily presses on saying such banal commentary as, “most peculiar”. Only after so much frustration and ape-shit crazy does she finally become persuaded that what she actually wants to do is just find a way to get out of her drug induced nightmare as soon as possible....I’m not sure if it’s really drug induced but seriously this poor girl was eating a lot of mushrooms or something.

The main problem with this movie isn’t so much that there is no story, there’s kind of a story if you have a character that wants to do anything, but rather it’s that Alice is no character at all. Alice is simply, wholly, unappealing. She’s really, if anything, and I suspect this is true of Carroll’s books, just a prop to bridge one looney scenario to the next. A veritable pawn in a game of gee-whiz intellectual gratification. The consequence is that you just don’t care about her or her half-hearted commentary on “how strange it all is”. I didn’t feel a thing for her and why should I because she doesn’t seem to even realize she has a problem for like three quarters of the movie....until she breaks down crying and dagnabbit that doesn’t freaking count because it’s cheating!

While this is barely a movie at all, it is still very interesting in some places and the wonderland world really is spectacular to behold. I think it is visually one of the very best Disney movies insofar as it clearly gave Disney’s eccentric animators a neat playground to let loose and do some of the crazy stuff you know those weirdos had been itching to try but couldn’t. Just recall the bout of awesome that is the mad tea party scene and the incredibly memorable music that accompanies it to see what I mean. Indeed the music in this movie is also very good now that I mention it. Further, many of the non-Alice characters and situations are fun and just as wildly imaginative.

And then it just sort of all ends. Like that. It’s all just a dream and everyone can go on living their lives as if it never happened. I really like it.

We give it 3.6 white rabbits out of 5