43 – Alice In Wonderland

Did you know that I watched two episodes of Smallville before I knew it was about Superman? It’s like not knowing Planet of the Apes is about apes. Or that Star Wars has lightsabres in it. Or that Snakes On A Plane doesn’t take place on land. But would you believe that there was a very long time before I knew that Alice In Wonderland was meant to be weird?

I can remember the movie being a huge part of my childhood, and I would often watch it several times a day. I’m not the only one; I read a reddit AMA from a girl who used to play Alice at the Disneyland parks, and she met an autistic boy who had latched onto the movie religiously. There does seem to be a fanbase of people on the spectrum who really enjoy it. I’ve seen discussions that autistic children can relate to Alice’s feelings of being in a world that makes no sense to her, and some people often use the story as a way of describing what being autistic is like. There’s also a fan theory on TV Tropes that each Wonderland character represents a different trait of the condition.

Lewis Caroll wrote two books about a girl called Alice who dreams herself into a surreal fantasy world where nothing makes sense – naming her after his friend’s daughter Alice Liddell. Walt Disney had been trying to adapt the story for years; in fact some of his first shorts were adapted from the Alice stories.

Uncle Walt desperately wanted to make a feature-length Alice film as soon as he got to Hollywood. Early ideas included a Song of the South type project with an animated Wonderland while actress Mary Pickford played Alice in live action.

But the ever increasing costs of animation and the impending Second World War saw Disney taking a break from releasing feature films. Once the war was over, and Disney marked a comeback with Cinderella – it looked like an Alice film was back on the cards. It went through many drafts and revisions, and there is some concept art that looks more like something from American McGee’s Alice.

When production was picked back up on the film, another idea was to have a more meta-textual story revolving around Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll – featuring Queen Victoria as a character as well. Margaret O’Brien – child star of The Secret Garden, Meet Me In St Louis and the Technicolor remake of Little Women – really wanted to star as Alice. Walt wasn’t feeling the idea and was persuaded to focus on the wackiness of Wonderland – thanks to reasons that I’ll go into a bit further down the line.

We open in a sunny meadow, where a young girl called Alice is doing as much as she can to avoid listening to a history lesson from her…sister? Aunt? Governess? Anyway she’s more interested in dreaming about a world of her own where all books having pictures is the only sensible thing.

Alice’s voice actress is Kathryn Beaumont, who would also voice Wendy in Peter Pan. She had very little work in film after that, but when you voice two lead Disney females that does kind of set you for life. She even lent her voice to Alice and Wendy for the Kingdom Hearts video games and the House of Mouse TV series decades later. Her performance is a real highlight – where she makes Alice both pompous and endearing at the same time. Her constant questioning of Wonderland’s logic is funny rather than annoying, and she can make you really feel for the girl when she wants to. Sadly there’s one area she’s not quite good at.

It’s quite hard to be a Disney heroine when one doesn’t have much of a singing voice, but Alice only gets three songs so no harm done. This first one was planned to be a slower ballad called “Beyond The Laughing Sky” – but they soon knew her vocal range just wasn’t up to it. They instead picked the more upbeat “World Of My Own”, which was easier for Kathryn to sing. And I kind of dig it. It’s not perfect but it’ll do.

Alice notices a rabbit wearing a waistcoat and watch running by, wailing about being late. She’s not worried about why a talking rabbit is here, why he’s dressed in human clothes or how he’s able to tell time. She instead is fascinated by what he could possibly be late for.

Alice decides to follow him (despite using every other line to insist how wrong it would be). Naturally she goes through a rabbit hole and falls down. And I assure you that’ll be the last natural thing that happens in this movie.

This sequence is the one I can remember most from when I read the book as a child. It’s a pretty internalised chapter, where Alice starts questioning her identity and wondering if she’s in fact someone else she knows. The film drops most of that and focuses mainly on setting up the surreal stuff of Wonderland. It’s now that the art style really becomes famously bizarre. And newer viewers might not realise what a big deal this was at the time. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass were visually defined by the illustrations of John Tenniel – which is a very un-Disney style of art.

In the days before mass pop culture, this was what everyone thought of when you mentioned the Alice stories. Uncle Walt however decided to go with a different direction when it came to the movie’s concept art…

An artist called Mary Blair worked with Disney briefly during the 1930s, but found herself tagging along to Latin America with the company when her husband was hired to do research. It was there that, inspired by the bright colours she saw, her vibrant modernistic style really came about. Uncle Walt was so impressed by her work that he hired her to do concept art for Cinderella, Peter Pan and of course Alice In Wonderland. He kept telling his animators to make sure they got her artwork into the films somehow – but that proved difficult when trying to maintain the Disney house style.

Back off, Cinders!

The Disney house style in the 50s was simple, easy to replicate and used depth as opposed to colour. Mary Blair’s art was thought to be too flat to use on the big screen. Thankfully with Alice there was a good opportunity for a compromise. Alice herself is done in the Disney house style – while Wonderland is done to resemble Mary’s art.

Alice finally gets to the bottom of the rabbit hole (and Kingdom Hearts names it the ‘Bizarre Room’) where she finds a talking doorknob. He doesn’t exist in either of Lewis Carroll’s books but since he makes jokes like “you did give me quite a turn” you can bet I don’t care one bit. What I do care about is the sheer hell he puts Alice through trying to get to the other side of his door. He has her drink from a bottle that shrinks her – and THEN tells her he’s locked with a key that was on the top of the table the bottle came from. Either he thinks it’s more practical to give directions out of order, or that’s his sense of humour.

Alice then has to eat a cookie that makes her grow as big as the room itself. The whole ordeal starts getting to her, so she bursts into tears. And being the size that she is, the crying creates an ocean. And if The Fault In Our Stars had been around back then, she probably could have drowned the whole universe.

Alice drinks from the bottle again and shrinks so that she nearly drowns in the ocean she just created. Kathryn Beaumont remarks “I do wish I hadn’t cried so much” as if she’d left the oven on (as opposed to starting an impromptu monsoon!) – but at least Alice is the right size to fit through the doorknob. While sailing through the ocean, she spots a Dodo and several other creatures having a Caucus Race to get dry. It involves running around in a circle – which ironically was a more sensible idea in the book where the waves weren’t continually washing over them. And whenever Alice tries to point out the logic behind this, a wave just knocks her over.

When I watched this back for the first time in years, I laughed so hard I could probably have created an ocean of my own. But the White Rabbit washes up on shore too, so Alice chases after him. He gets away, and she gets sidetracked by Tweedledee and Tweedledum.

They decide to tell Alice a poem about “The Walrus & the Carpenter”, which has always been my least favourite part of the film. To summarise, the eponymous Walrus and Carpenter lure a family of oyster children away from their mother for a party. The Carpenter thinks the oysters are having dinner with them – not realising the Walrus intended them to be the dinner.

Once the Tweedles have finished their story, Alice leaves them to it and finds the White Rabbit’s house. He somehow thinks she’s his maid Mary Anne and orders her to find his gloves. In the book Alice has another attack of the weird priorities; worrying that she’ll run into the real Mary Anne and be turned out of the house before she finds the rabbit’s gloves. In the film she hasn’t learned her lesson about eating Wonderland food…

For live action reference, the animators actually built a prop house for Kathryn Beaumont to sit in and then rebuilt it with transparent walls so they could see how she would move inside.

The White Rabbit is quite alarmed at finding a human taking up that much space in his house, and he tries to get the Dodo’s help. As you’d expect from a creature whose idea for getting dry was to run in a circle while the waves are rolling in – his suggestions are to pull Alice out the chimney or smoke her out. Alice is finally getting savvy to how Wonderland works and eats a carrot from the Rabbit’s garden.

Alice has now shrunk to the size of a blade of grass. And that’s where she ends up next – in a garden of talking flowers. But also an army of creatures that are like crack for those of us who like puns.

But now onto the flowers. These too are from Through The Looking Glass and they also don’t sing in the book, but hey this is Disney. The song is called “Golden Afternoon”, and it’s a very nice little piece. Most of the other songs in the film are pretty wacky or more along the lines of Simpsons musical numbers – but this has a different, almost dreamlike feel to it. It’s accompanied by some really beautiful artwork in the animation. Even a film this bizarre can still have that classic charm of the work from Walt’s era.

And how awesome is this red rose? Along with conducting an entire garden to sing that nice song, she’s the only Wonderland character who is 100% decent to Alice. We can’t say the same for the other flowers – who get suspicious that Alice is really a weed and chase her out of the garden. Her attention is then caught by a certain caterpillar.

Y’know I try to defend the movie from those people who claim the entire thing was made on drugs – but I really have no case with this character.

Anyway the Caterpillar sequence is incredibly fun, and not just because this time Alice gets to be the one antagonising a Wonderland resident. He’s voiced by English comic actor Richard Haydn who some fans might be shocked to discover also played Uncle Max in The Sound of Music – and he brings a very dry edge that stands out when the rest of Wonderland’s characters are more over-the-top. The Caterpillar does get heated when Alice says she doesn’t want to remain just three inches high.

The Caterpillar boils over with rage – which apparently is the Wonderland equivalent of cocooning yourself – and turns into a butterfly. Before he flies off, he tells Alice that the mushroom she’s standing on will make her grow taller or shorter depending on what side she eats. She does so, and grows to well over fifty feet. This is actually less grotesque than the book – where only her neck grew that big! It therefore makes less sense when a bird uprooted from her nest by Alice’s growth spurt thinks she’s a serpent. But Alice gets the knack of it and uses the mushroom to get to the right size.

Now at the right height to go exploring, Alice finds herself in a forest clearing with nothing but unhelpful signs of where to go next. But she also finds…

Ah, the Cheshire Cat.

This dude was my favourite character when I watched the movie over and over as a child. At school the book was chosen for World Book Week one year, and so our form had a tea party in the classroom with everyone dressed as the characters. And me in a purple jumper with pink crepe paper for stripes was one of only two Cheshire Cats. The cat is much friendlier in the book, but here he does nothing but troll Alice. To fantastic effect. It speaks volumes about how accustomed Alice is to Wonderland that the cat literally standing on his head is just given an annoyed grunt.

He reattaches his head and points Alice in the direction of a tea party held by the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. These two are probably the most remembered characters of the movie, and they don’t appear until forty minutes in. They’re celebrating everyone’s un-birthday – which I sincerely hope I don’t have to explain – and Alice gets to join in. As a fun fact, the animators had test footage recorded of the actors acting out the scene for reference. Ed Wynn, who voiced the Mad Hatter, did a lot of improvising so that when they brought him in to record what he’d improvised – they found that it didn’t have the same spark. So Uncle Walt had them try to clean up the audio from the test footage to make it usable in the film.

Alice gets steadily more pissed off when she’s denied a cup of tea and forced to keep changing places – but then the White Rabbit shows up. For a guy who claims to be late, he sure takes a lot of detours. The Hatter and Hare try to repair his watch for him. But since the repairing includes putting butter, jam, sugar and lemon in it – you can guess how that works out.

Alice has had enough nonsense and vows that she’s going home. Where she actually goes is the Tulgey Wood. At this point, there were plans for the White Knight from Through The Looking Glass to show up and help Alice out – also designing him off Walt Disney’s likeness. Uncle Walt cut the character himself, feeling that Alice needed to learn a lesson on her own. Thus comes the song “Very Good Advice” – which is a surprisingly big tear jerker for such a wacky movie. The shot of poor Alice crying in the wood as the sobbing creatures around her gradually fade away is unbelievably sad.

If there’s anyone who can make Alice feel better it’s…well it’s definitely NOT the Cheshire Cat. But he shows up anyway and suggests that she could try to find the Queen of Hearts. Alice finds herself in a maze where a trio of playing cards have planted white roses by mistake, and thus are painting them red hoping to fool said Queen. As these cards are yet another rare breed of Wonderland residents who are nice to Alice, she joins in. Too bad the Queen is coming.

I didn’t take much notice of this sequence as a child, but wow, that is some stellar animation. Like in the “Golden Afternoon” sequence, the more outlandish Mary Blair designs get to take centre stage. The cards arriving like this doesn’t really do much for the plot, so I’m betting it was put in as a way to give Mary’s art some more focus. If her artwork is too flat for the Disney house style, then use it for literally flat characters. Sadly the cards who were painting the roses red are to be beheaded once the Queen discovers what they’ve done.

The Queen of Hearts is an iconic character, but most of what we think we know about her comes from the Disney version. Sure in the book she does have the desire to chop everyone’s head off – but no one’s in any real danger and the King pardons everyone behind her back. Her mood swings come from the Duchess – a different character in the book – who is rude when Alice first meets her and then nice the next time she sees her. And the line “all ways are my ways” comes from the Red Queen in Through The Looking Glass – because she’s a chess piece who can move anywhere on the board. The following croquet game is from the book though.

The film changes the context around so that the game is rigged in the Queen’s favour just to drive Alice up the wall even further. In the book, Alice is in on the secret and the White Rabbit even tells her she’s playing too well. The trouble with her flamingo and hedgehog is something Alice does willingly. But as seeing Alice being trolled has been so entertaining thus far, that’s what happens. And then the Cheshire Cat has to show up…

Alice gets blamed for this and is put on trial. In the book the trial is actually for the Knave of Hearts’s suspected theft of the Queen’s tarts (deserts, not the other thing). Alice is called as the third witness, which segues into the finale. The croquet game and the trial are unrelated in the book, but the film ties them together in order to build to a climax. It also calls back more characters who have already appeared – including the Mad Hatter, who calls to celebrate the Queen’s un-birthday.

Her present turns out to be the Cheshire Cat, which means Alice gets in trouble once again. This time she remembers the mushroom in her dress and grows gigantic after eating it. Now that she has nothing to fear, she reads the Queen the riot act and puts her in her place. Unfortunately for her, she ate both the mushroom pieces. So she shrinks back to her original size before she’s even finished her abuse.

At this point in the book, Alice realises she’s dreaming as the cards fly on top of her. But the film goes for a bigger climax – so Alice gets chased through the various locations she was previously in. The Unshaved Mouse described this as a good way of showing how Wonderland is crumbling around Alice as she gets closer to waking up. Eventually she finds herself back with the Doorknob, who opens his keyhole to show that she’s asleep on the grass outside. She snaps awake and heads home for tea with her sister, probably having learned nothing from her time in Wonderland.

You would not expect that one of the first Disney films to be released on home video was a Box Office failure but…

$2.4 million on a $3 million budget.

Alice was not received well by critics at all. A beloved classic of British literature turned into a children’s cartoon, full of silly songs and slapstick comedy and – even worse – with American voice actors in there! In fact one of the biggest criticisms of the film was that Uncle Walt had “Americanized” a distinctly British story – despite the majority of the cast being British. Walt had actually predicted this, and eventually disowned the film. It didn’t get re-released until 1971 – long after he had passed away. It eventually found its audience among – you guessed it – hippies and stoners in the 60s.

I find it quite ironic that the company’s next film Peter Pan – also featuring Kathryn Beaumont – was a smash hit that Walt looked on much more fondly. Peter Pan is a film that has not aged well – and not just with the blatant racism and sexism. It’s one of the few Disney films I don’t like, and it feels like an incredibly watered down version of the story. Alice In Wonderland however is obviously a Disney creation, but still feels true to the spirit of Lewis Carroll’s book. Just like Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes putting a different spin on a classic story – while still keeping the essence – Alice captures everything that made the book special. Although Walt would say that Alice ‘lacked heart’, I think the legions of children – particularly those on the autism spectrum – who relate to Alice disagree. Just read these stories from a girl who worked as an Alice at Disneyland. “Alice” wasn’t my first word and I didn’t watch it twenty times a day – but I still forced my friends to act out scenes from it in the playground, got excited when my aunt grew her hair out like Alice for her wedding and can quote it like some people quote Mean Girls. Whatever critics of the 1950s thought, Alice has been around in the hearts of children over the years and despite its reputation as a stoner movie, it’s considered a classic of the Disney Animated Canon. And I have to say that out of all the characters in all the films on this list, it’s Alice who feels the most like an old friend.

Off with the grades!

*Story? This is a movie that’s very episodic – and there were about five different directors working on separate segments – so while things happen there’s no actual plot bar Alice trying to find out what the White Rabbit is up to. But it flows smooth enough, and feels more consistent than the Tim Burton film and its attempt at giving Alice an arc. B+

*Characters? Lots of them come in and out of the story and the majority work. The Walrus & the Carpenter, the Tweedles and maybe Bill the lizard are the only ones that don’t do it for me. The tea party crew are of course the most remembered, but my favourite is still the Cheshire Cat. I think the film does a good job of including as many as possible without making things too cluttered. A-

*Performances? Kathryn Beaumont does better work here than she does as Wendy. Alice becomes a lot of fun entirely through her performance, and it’ll be very hard to get used to someone else filling the role in her retirement. Ed Wynn (the Hatter) and Verna Felton (the Queen) stood out among the rest of the cast. A

*Visuals? Brilliant bold colours, and some great backdrops manage to find the blend between the Disney house style and Mary Blair’s artwork. The “Golden Afternoon” sequence is a visual treat. A

*Anything Else? While some of the music is great, the songs themselves…”Golden Afternoon” is about the only one that’s pleasant to listen to. C

From the rabbit hole to the costume store, because Scream is next.