Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Directed by: Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske | 72 minutes | music, animation, comedy, family, fantasy | Original voice cast: Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn, Richard Haydn, Sterling Holloway, Jerry Colonna, Verna Felton, J. Pat O’Malley, Bill Thompson

Walt Disney already made his first feature-length cartoon in 1937: “Snow White”. After that classic many others would follow, ‘Alice in Wonderland’ came out in 1951 (a year after ‘Cinderella’) and was already the 13th animated film from Disney. The script was written by British writer Aldous Huxley, but of course the book is by Charles Dodgson, using the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.

Lewis Carroll had a great fondness for little girls, which he admittedly never converted into a sexual relationship. He even felt obliged to cut off contact with his child friends when they turned sixteen, because then it would appear as if he had dishonorable intentions. His favorite among all those little girls was Alice Lidell.

That the Alice in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ keeps growing and shrinking seems a clear reference to this maturing of the girl that Carroll would like to keep small. The characters in the Alice stories are taken from the environment of little Alice Liddell, Dodgson (Carroll) himself is the Dodo (he stuttered: do-do-dodgson).

So much for the background of the story, back to the Disney variant. This one comes from the 50s and it shows: the little know-it-all Alice is the height of naughtiness. Initially, the film received bad reviews and Walt Disney himself later said that he also disliked the film. But the surreal elements in the film were well received by the hippie generation and because of the many meanings that people can see in it, Alice is also an interesting film for adults.

‘Alice in Wonderland’ has survived the Disney metamorphosis fairly untouched. Of course not the entire book is included and interesting bits from the sequel Through the Looking Glass have also been used, so that the sequence of the scenes is different and there are missing bites (for example, nothing at all about the chess pieces, or the mock turtle, not even hump tee dump tee). The many parodied nursery rhymes that appear in the book are quickly broached by Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but that’s about it, no endless variations on nursery rhymes with which Dodgson entertained his young audience. This adaptation is not disturbing at all, on the contrary. The story of Alice has become a whole in the Disney version. It has also become more absurd, especially for Dutch viewers, who will not notice the scarce references to the old nursery rhymes. After 72 minutes (they don’t make movies that short anymore) you feel like you’ve seen a lot more than you can comprehend, but as irrational as the events are, the flow of the story almost makes sense. Of course she has to follow that white rabbit, and of course all roads lead her to that – obviously cruel – queen.

A large number of films (and musicals) have been made of Carroll’s story. But watching these attempts many viewers will suffer from vicarious shame. People in animal suits, or a girl who talks to actual animals… those are both options that don’t deserve a beauty prize. And also in terms of credibility, they do not come close to the animation version of the story. As dowdy as Disney’s Alice is, you still hope she finds her bunny and that she can keep her head. Alice is a film that continues to captivate generation after generation. She is timeless, although she does gain in mystery over time. A great merit of the film is also that it does not have one obvious moral, as is generally the case with other Disney films. This ties in with Lewis Carroll’s intentions: he did not want to patronize children, but to entertain them.