Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Alice in Wonderland (Dir: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson & Hamilton Luske, 1951).

Long in the public domain, Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has inspired countless movie adaptations. Arguably the most successful screen version is Walt Disney’s feature length animation. Not for being slavishly faithful to the source material. Rather for fashioning an entertaining and distinctive work of art from a largely non-narrative, surrealist text. 

The well known story of Alice... concerns a curious young girl who chases a waistcoat wearing rabbit down a rabbithole into the weird and wonderful Wonderland. Many encounters with assorted freaks later, her adventure concludes with an unusual game of croquet in the court of the Queen of Hearts.   

Complaints about alterations to Carroll's original aside, Alice in Wonderland, is a stunningly realised, extraordinarily imaginative work. It looks beautiful, with bold character design and lush backgrounds showing the influence of colour stylist Mary Blair. With many dazzling set-pieces, from Alice's encounter with a garden of tuneful flowers to the Mad Tea Party, it is one of the most technically accomplished of all Disney features. Highlight for me is the March of the Cards sequence which is an astonishing array of movement and colour; even more impressive when you consider this was produced in a pre-digital, even pre-Xerox era. 

At the core of the movie, Kathryn Beaumont's very English, no-nonsense vocal performance as Alice perfectly contrasts the more 'out-there' lunacy of her co-stars. The voices of Ed Wynn (the Mad Hatter), Sterling Holloway (the Chesire Cat) and Jerry Colonna (the March Hare) were all well known to audience and this is an early example of Disney characters trading on the famous personalities of their voice. While in later movies this proved to be a little distracting, it works well here. 

Alice... also boasts an excellent soundtrack; Oliver Wallace's lush musical score complementing hit songs, such as Sammy Fain and Bob Hillard's I'm Late and  Mack David, Jerry Livingston and Al Hoffman's The Unbirthday Song, which have become standards in their own right.

 

Contemporary critics bemoaned that the characters were more Disney than Carroll. In retrospect this is probably the adaptations greatest asset. Sensing that the book’s highly detailed John Tenniel illustration would be virtually impossible to transfer to animation, the Disney artists streamlined the character appearances, ‘Disney-fying’ them if you will; retaining the essence of Tenniel, but fleshing out the design to be plausible as they move through their animated environs. One could also argue that the movie’s many supporting characters are underdeveloped, or a least underused, as they wander in and out of the narrative having little actual influence on it. However, this argument too, fails to hold water when one considers the enduring popularity of the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts et al to this day.  

Perhaps the only genuine flaw - and it is a minor one - is the episodic nature of the narrative. There is little plot, other than Alice stumbling from one crazy sequence to another in her attempt to go home. Yet the source material itself is episodic and I feel that the balance between producing a faithful version of the book and an original motion picture movie is largely successful. 

After a disappointing performance at the box office Alice... was relegated to screening, in edited form, on the weekly Disneyland anthology TV series. The movie was not seen again in its original length in cinemas until a 1974 reissue, when it’s psychedelic poster art made little attempt to distance itself from it reputation as a ‘head’ film. A quarter of a decade following its original release, Alice in Wonderland finally took its place among the classic Disney animated features; regarded alongside Fantasia (various directors, 1940) and The Three Caballeros (Norman Ferguson, 1944) as a visually stunning piece of proto-psychedelia. 

While it is, perhaps, not a masterpiece of storytelling in the manner of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937) or Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske & Ben Sharpsteen, 1940), Alice in Wonderland is still an eye popping extravaganza that holds up to the best of Disney. With so much to enjoy and admire in Alice..., repeated visits to Wonderland are essential.