Fifty Before '50: ALICE IN WONDERLAND

 by JB

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small...

In 1951, Walt Disney Studios released Alice in Wonderland, a film that had been kicking around the studio for the better part of thirteen years. The studio had high hopes for its success. Certainly, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio had proved that beloved children’s book + Disney magic = box office bonanzas.

THE PLOT IN BRIEF: Alice and her sister spend some time together by a tree. Alice is not interested in her sister’s history lesson and begins to daydream. She chases a passing White Rabbit and plummets down a hole. After ingesting magical cookies and mysterious liquids, she ends up in Wonderland and meets twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Dodo, a hookah-smoking caterpillar, and the Cheshire Cat. She ends up at a Mad Tea Party, attended by the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, and (briefly) the White Rabbit. The Cheshire Cat directs Alice to the Castle of the Red Queen, and Alice quickly runs afoul of her. The Red Queen orders Alice brutally executed. Except for the fact that many of these characters are anthropomorphic animals, how on earth is this a film for children?

MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT: It’s all a dream. So there.

Alice in Wonderland was the rare animated film that was not a hit for the Walt Disney Studio upon its original release. I would humbly suggest that any or all of the following might be reasons for its relative failure:

1. Lewis Carroll’s particular brand of whimsey and fantasy does not match Walt Disney’s particular brand whimsey and fantasy; it’s like oil and water.

2. The film has a protagonist who is unsympathetic and weak; she is acted upon more than active, and her actions largely consist of eating biscuits and delivering stern, humorless lectures. Critic Miyako Pleines wrote, "Unlike the other Disney princesses before her, Alice seemed to have no real purpose (even if that purpose is simply to be a damsel in distress). People saw her as lacking ambition and drive, a lazy girl who daydreamed during her studies and wandered into a magical world.”

3. The film is full of songs (16!) but only a single memorable one: “A Very Merry Un-Birthday.”

4. The film has too many characters (Eighteen, by my count) and a plot that consists of “and then she went here... and then she went here... and then she went here.”

5. With the exceptions of Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter and Bill Thomas as the White Rabbit, the voice cast is uninteresting and interchangeable.

6. Structurally, the film is very much like The Wizard of Oz, but here the ending feels like a cheat because Alice has not forged any kind of relationship with any of the other characters.

7. Some of the material presented is quite “Un-Disneylike:” During “The Walrus and the Carpenter” segment, oysters are presented as little babies in diapers and bonnets... and (SPOILER ALERT) the Walrus eats them. As Goofy might say, “Garsh!”

8. Some of the character design and direction is a tad creepy; I could see little children in the early 1950s being frightened by this film.

9. In spite of all I've mentioned above, this version of Alice in Wonderland still manages to be quite boring.

Post-World War II, Disney released several compendium films—Make Mine Music (1946), Fun and Fancy Free (1947), and Melody Time (1948)—that were little more than collections of shorts. If these “feature films” failed, Disney planned to release the shorts separately. That was not the release strategy with Alice, but you can see how the anthology films' strategy of using different teams of animators for each segment “trickled down” to Alice, assigning various teams to work on segments where the only common element is Alice herself. (This is a very episodic film. Other episodes from the book were planned for, but later cut from, Alice in Wonderland: the Jabberwocky, the White Knight, the Duchess, the Mock Turtle, Humpty Dumpty, and the Gryphon all “hit the studio floor” before final animation began.)

I’m sure this “teams” approach saved production time. Hand-drawn animation is very expensive to produce. What’s lost is any kind of narrative cohesion between the segments. Animator Ward Kimball thought the film "...suffered from too many cooks—directors. Here was a case of [nine] directors each trying to top the other guy and make his sequence the biggest and craziest in the show. This had a self-canceling effect on the final product."

Why is this an ideal cartoon to watch today for Junesploitation? Because after a few years had passed, a random bean counter at the Disney Studios noticed that this film was doing big business in the 16mm rental market on college campuses.

Hmmmmmm. The 1960s. College campuses. Alice in Wonderland.

Disney Studios pulled the film from 16mm rental, and mounted a nation-wide theatrical re-release with a new trippy ad campaign. Disney Studios exploited itself. Don’t believe me? Go ask Alice... when she was just small.

NOTE: Three weeks ago, on May 5, Alice in Wonderland was released in 4K Blu-ray to celebrate the film's 75th anniversary. The Disney restoration team spent nine months on a digital scan of the original nitrate negative. The Walt Disney Animation Research Library collaborated with Walt Disney Animation Studios to ensure the restoration remained true to the animators' original intent and color palate. This is a terrific-looking disc and the two teams finally put the colors back to the way they were in 1951; it is highly recommended for that reason alone.