Psycho's Movie Reviews #414: Alice In Wonderland (1951)

Alice in Wonderland is a 1951 American animated musical fantasy comedy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and based on the Alice books by Lewis Carroll. The thirteenth release of Disney's animated features, the film premiered in London on July 26, 1951, and in New York City on July 28, 1951. The film features the voices of Kathryn Beaumont as Alice, Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat, Verna Felton as the Queen of Hearts, and Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter. Walt Disney first tried to adapt Alice into a feature-length animated film in the 1930s and revived the idea in the 1940s. The film was originally intended to be a live-action/animated film; however, Disney decided to make it a fully animated film in 1946.

The film was considered a disappointment on its initial release, therefore was shown on television as one of the first episodes of Disneyland. Its 1974 re-release in theaters proved to be much more successful, leading to subsequent re-releases, merchandising and home video releases. Although the film received generally negative critical reviews on its initial release, it has been more positively reviewed over the years.

A live-action adaptation of Carroll's works and a live-action re-imagining of the story, Alice in Wonderland, directed by Tim Burton, was released in 2010. A sequel to the film, Alice Through the Looking Glass, directed by James Bobin, was released in 2016.

Plot

In a park in England, a young girl named Alice with her cat, Dinah, listens distractedly to her sister's history lesson, and begins daydreaming of a nonsensical world. She spots a passing White Rabbit in a waistcoat, who panics of being late. Alice follows him into a burrow and plummets down a deep rabbit hole. Upon landing in a place called Wonderland, she finds herself facing a tiny door, whose handle advises drinking from a bottle on a nearby table. She shrinks to an appropriate height, but has forgotten the key on the table. She then eats a cookie that causes her to grow excessively. Exasperated by these changes of state, she begins to cry and floods the room with her tears. She takes another sip from the bottle to shrink again, and rides the empty bottle through the keyhole. As Alice continues to follow the Rabbit after encountering a “Cacaus Race”, she encounters numerous characters, including Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who recount the tale of "The Walrus and the Carpenter". Alice tracks the Rabbit to his house; he mistakes her for his housemaid, "Mary Ann", and sends her inside to retrieve his gloves. While searching for the gloves, Alice finds and eats another cookie and grows giant, getting stuck in the house. Thinking her a monster, the Rabbit asks the Dodo to help expel her. When the Dodo decides to burn the house down, Alice escapes by eating a carrot from the Rabbit's garden, which causes her to shrink to 3 inches tall.

Continuing to follow the Rabbit, Alice meets a garden of talking flowers who initially welcome her with a song, but then banish her, believing that humans are a type of weed. Alice then encounters a Caterpillar smoking, who becomes enraged at Alice after she laments her small size (which is the same as the Caterpillar's), after which the Caterpillar turns into a butterfly and flies away. Before leaving, the Caterpillar advises Alice to eat a piece from different sides of a mushroom to alter her size. Following a period of trial and error, she returns to her original height and keeps the remaining pieces in her pocket. In the woods, Alice gets stuck between multiple paths and encounters the mischievous Cheshire Cat, who suggests questioning the Mad Hatter or the March Hare to learn the Rabbit's location, but is unhelpful in giving directions. Taking her own path, Alice encounters both, along with the Dormouse, in the midst of an "unbirthday" tea party celebration. The Hatter and the Hare ask Alice to explain her predicament, to which Alice tries but becomes frustrated by their interruptions and absurd logic. As she prepares to leave, the Rabbit appears and the Hatter attempts to repair his pocket watch, which results in its destruction. Alice attempts to follow the Rabbit after he is ejected from the premises, but decides to go home instead. Unfortunately, her surroundings completely change, leaving her lost in the forest.

The Cheshire Cat reappears to the despondent Alice and offers a path to the hot-headed Queen of Hearts, the only one who can take her home. In the Queen's labyrinthine garden, Alice witnesses the Queen – whom the Rabbit serves as a chamberlain – sentencing a trio of playing cards to decapitation for painting mistakenly-planted white rosebushes red. The Queen invites a reluctant Alice to play against her in a croquet match, in which live flamingos, card guards, and hedgehogs are used as equipment. The equipment rig the game in favor of the Queen. The Cat appears again and plays a trick on the Queen, setting up Alice to be framed. Before the Queen can sentence her to decapitation, the King suggests a formal trial. At Alice's trial, the Cat invokes more chaos by having Alice point him out, causing one of the witnesses – the Dormouse – to panic. As the Queen sentences Alice to decapitation, Alice eats the mushroom pieces to grow large, momentarily intimidating the court. However, the mushroom's effect is short-lived, forcing Alice to flee through the deteriorating realm with a large crowd in pursuit. When Alice reaches the small door she encountered, she sees herself sleeping through the keyhole. Alice emerges from her dream, and she returns home for tea with her sister.

Production

Development

Walt Disney was familiar with Lewis Carroll's Alice books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), and had read them as a school boy.

In 1923, he was a 21-year-old aspiring filmmaker working at the Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, making the unsuccessful short cartoon series by the name of Newman Laugh-O-Grams. The last of Newman Laugh-O-Grams was called Alice's Wonderland, which was loosely inspired by the Alice books. The short featured a live-action girl (Virginia Davis) interacting with an animated world. Faced with business problems, however, the Laugh-O-Gram Studio went bankrupt in July 1923, and the film was never released to the general public. However, Disney left for Hollywood and used the film to show to potential distributors. Margaret J. Winkler of Winkler Pictures agreed to distribute the Alice Comedies, and Disney partnered with his older brother Roy O. Disney and re-hired Kansas City co-workers including Ub Iwerks, Rudolph Ising, Friz Freleng, Carman Maxwell and Hugh Harman to form the Disney Brothers Studios, which was later re-branded Walt Disney Productions. The series began in 1924 before being retired in 1927.

In 1933, Disney considered making a feature-length animated-and-live-action version of Alice starring Mary Pickford. However, these plans were eventually scrapped in favour of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, mainly because Disney was put off by Paramount's 1933 live-action adaptation Alice in Wonderland. However, Disney did not completely abandon the idea of adapting Alice, and in 1936 he made the Mickey Mouse cartoon Thru the Mirror.

In 1938, after the enormous success of Snow White, Disney bought the film rights of Alice in Wonderland with Sir John Tenniel's illustrations, and officially registered the title with the Motion Picture Association of America. He then hired storyboard artist Al Perkins and art director David S. Hall to develop the story and concept art for the film. A story reel was completed in 1939, but Disney was not pleased; he felt that Hall's drawings resembled Tenniel's drawings too closely, making them too difficult to animate, and that the overall tone of Perkins' script was too grotesque and dark. Realizing the amount of work needed for Alice in Wonderland, and with the economic devastation of World War II and the production demands of Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi, Disney shelved production on Alice in Wonderland shortly after the screening.

In fall 1945, shortly after the war ended, Disney revived Alice in Wonderland and hired British author Aldous Huxley to re-write the script. Huxley devised a story in which Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell (the inspiration for Alice) were misunderstood and persecuted following the book's publication. In Huxley's story, stage actress Ellen Terry was sympathetic to both Carroll and Liddell, and Queen Victoria served as the deus ex machina, validating Carroll due to her appreciation for the book. Disney considered child actress Margaret O'Brien for the title role. However, he felt that Huxley's version was too literal an adaptation of Carroll's book. Background artist Mary Blair submitted some concept drawings for Alice in Wonderland. Blair's paintings moved away from Tenniel's detailed illustrations by taking a modernist stance, using bold and unreal colours. Walt liked Blair's designs, and the script was re-written to focus on comedy, music, and the whimsical side of Carroll's books.

Around this time, Disney considered making a live-action-and-animated version of Alice in Wonderland (similar to his short Alice Comedies) that would star Ginger Rogers and would utilize the recently developed sodium vapor process. Lisa Davis (who later voiced Anita Radcliffe in One Hundred and One Dalmatians) and Luana Patten were also considered for the role of Alice. However, Disney soon realized that he could only do justice to the book by making an all-animated feature and, in 1946, work began on Alice in Wonderland. With the film tentatively scheduled for release in 1950, animation crews on Alice in Wonderland and Cinderella effectively competed against each other to see which film would finish first. By early 1948, Cinderella had progressed further than Alice in Wonderland.

A legal dispute with Dallas Bower's 1949 film version was also under way. Disney sued to prevent release of the British version in the U.S., and the case was extensively covered in Time magazine. The company that released the British version accused Disney of trying to exploit their film by releasing its version at virtually the same time.

Writing

Through various drafts of the script, many sequences that were present in Carroll's book drifted in and out of the story. However, Disney insisted that the scenes themselves keep close to those in the novel since most of its humour is in the writing.

One omitted scene from the 1939 treatment of the film occurred outside the Duchess' manor, where the Fish Footman is giving a message to the Frog Footman to take to the Duchess, saying that she is invited to play croquet with the Queen of Hearts. Alice overhears this and sneaks into the kitchen of the manor, where she finds the Duchess' Cook maniacally cooking and the Duchess nursing her baby. The cook is spraying pepper all over the room, causing the Duchess and Alice to sneeze and the baby to cry. After a quick conversation between Alice and the Duchess, the hot-tempered Cook starts throwing pots and pans at the noisy baby. Alice rescues the baby, but as she leaves the house the baby turns into a pig and runs away. The scene was scrapped for pacing reasons.

Another scene that was deleted from a later draft occurred in Tulgey Wood, where Alice encountered what appeared to be a sinister-looking Jabberwock hiding in the dark, before revealing himself as a comical-looking dragon-like beast with bells and factory whistles on his head. A song, "Beware the Jabberwock", was also written. However, the scene was scrapped in favour of The Walrus and the Carpenter poem. Out of a desire to keep the Jabberwocky poem in the film, it was made to replace an original song for the Cheshire Cat, "I'm Odd".

Another deleted scene in Tulgey Wood shows Alice consulting with The White Knight, who was meant to be somewhat a caricature of Walt Disney. Although Disney liked the scene, he felt it was better if Alice learned her lesson by herself, hence the song "Very Good Advice".

Other characters, such as The Mock Turtle and the Gryphon were discarded for pacing reasons, though they would later appear alongside Alice in some commercials.

Music

In an effort to retain some of Carroll's imaginative poems, Disney commissioned top songwriters to compose songs built around them for use in the film. Over 30 potential songs were written, and many of them were included in the film—some for only a few seconds—the greatest number of songs of any Disney film. In 1939, Frank Churchill was assigned to compose songs, and they were accompanied by a story reel featuring artwork from David S. Hall. Although none of his songs were used in the finished film, the melody for "Lobster Quadrille" was used for the song "Never Smile at a Crocodile" in Peter Pan. When work on Alice resumed in 1946, Tin Pan Alley songwriters Mack David, Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston began composing songs for it after working on Cinderella. However, the only song by the trio that made it into the film was "The Unbirthday Song".

While he was composing songs in New York, Sammy Fain had heard that the Disney studios wanted him to compose songs for Alice in Wonderland. He also suggested lyricist Bob Hilliard as his collaborator. The two wrote two unused songs for the film, "Beyond the Laughing Sky" and "I'm Odd". The music for the former song was kept but the lyrics were changed, and it later became the title song for Peter Pan, "The Second Star to the Right". By April 1950, Fain and Hilliard had finished composing songs for the film.

The title song, composed by Sammy Fain, has become a jazz standard, adapted by jazz pianist Dave Brubeck in 1952 and included on his 1957 Columbia album Dave Digs Disney. The song, "In a World of My Own," is included on the orange disc of Classic Disney: 60 Years of Musical Magic.

Release/Reception/Box Office

Alice in Wonderland premiered at the Leicester Square Theatre in London on July 26, 1951. During the film's initial theatrical run, the film was released as a double feature with the True-Life Adventures documentary short, Nature's Half Acre. Following the film's initial lukewarm reception, it was never re-released theatrically in Disney's lifetime, instead being shown occasionally on television. Alice in Wonderland aired as the second episode of the Walt Disney's Disneyland television series on ABC on November 3, 1954, in a severely edited version cut down to less than an hour.

Beginning in 1971, the film was screened in several sold-out venues at college campuses, becoming the most rented film in some cities. Then, in 1974, Disney gave Alice in Wonderland its first theatrical re-release. The company even promoted it as a film in tune with the "psychedelic times", using radio commercials featuring the song "White Rabbit" performed by Jefferson Airplane. This release was so successful that it warranted a subsequent re-release in 1981. Its first UK re-release was on July 26, 1979.

Despite being regarded as one of Disney's best animated films today, and gaining a large following, the initial reviews for Alice in Wonderland were very negative. Bosley Crowther, reviewing for The New York Times, complimented that "...if you are not too particular about the images of Carroll and Tenniel, if you are high on Disney whimsey and if you'll take a somewhat slow, uneven pace, you should find this picture entertaining. Especially should it be for the kids, who are not so demanding of fidelity as are their moms and dads. A few of the episodes are dandy, such as the mad tea party and the caucus race; the music is tuneful and sugary and the color is excellent." Variety wrote that the film "has an earnest charm and a chimerical beauty that best shows off the Carroll fantasy. However, it has not been able to add any real heart or warmth, ingredients missing from the two tomes and which have always been an integral part of the previous Disney feature cartoons."

Mae Tinee of the Chicago Tribune wrote that "While the Disney figures do resemble John Tenniel's famous sketches, they abound in energy but are utterly lacking in enchantment, and seem more closely related to Pluto, the clumsy pup, than the products of Carroll's imagination. Youngsters probably will find it a likable cartoon, full of lively characters, with Alice's dream bedecked with just a touch of nightmare—those who cherish the old story as I have probably will be distinctly disappointed." Time stated that "Judged simply as the latest in the long, popular line of Disney cartoons, Alice lacks a developed story line, which the studio's continuity experts, for all their freedom with scissors and paste, have been unable to put together out of the episodic books. Much of it is familiar stuff; Carroll's garden of live flowers prompts Disney to revive the style of his Silly Symphonies. Yet there is plenty to delight youngsters, and there are flashes of cartooning ingenuity that should appeal to grownups."

Alice in Wonderland was met with great criticism from Carroll fans, as well as from British film and literary critics, who accused Disney of "Americanizing" a great work of English literature. Walt Disney was not surprised by the critical reception to Alice in Wonderland—his version of Alice was intended for large family audiences, not literary critics—but despite all the long years of thought and effort Disney invested in it, the film met with a lukewarm response at the box office and was a sharp disappointment in its initial release. Additionally, he remarked that the film failed because it lacked heart. In The Disney Films, Leonard Maltin says that animator Ward Kimball felt the film failed because "it suffered from too many cooks—directors. Here was a case of five directors each trying to top the other guy and make his sequence the biggest and craziest in the show. This had a self-cancelling effect on the final product."

On the film aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Alice in Wonderland received an approval rating of 81% from 32 critical reviews with an average rating of 6.6/10. The consensus states, "A good introduction to Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice in Wonderland boasts some of the Disney canon's most surreal and twisted images."

During its initial theatrical run, the film grossed $2.4 million in domestic rentals. Because of the film's production budget of $3 million, the studio wrote off a million-dollar loss. During its theatrical re-release in 1974, the film grossed $3.5 million in domestic rentals.

Budget $3 million

Box office $2.4 million (1951, domestic)

$3.5 million (1974, domestic)

My Review

I was a little worried when I went to watch the film version of Alice In Wonderland, because I just read the novel and Disney has a tendency to dumb down the material that they make into their films with goofball romantic nonsense and cutesy talking animals. While I did get more than the traditional share of talking animals with this film (as well as a variety of other inanimate objects), the film stayed more faithful to the original story than is generally expected from a Disney film. On the other hand, this WAS made in 1951, which makes me wonder what a more modern adaptation would look like.

I read Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass for English 180 (Children's Literature) at the University of California, Davis, so needless to say, I read it with more of a literary appreciation than is generally applied to children's books. I was pleased to see so many of the characters from the second novel in this version of Alice In Wonderland (such as the Cheshire Cat, the talking flowers in the garden, and Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum), although I must admit that I was slightly disappointed to see that Through The Looking Glass has been assimilated into this version of Alice In Wonderland rather than adapted into its own film, which I think is an honor that it certainly deserves.

As far as being a full length feature (although rather short at roughly 75 minutes), however, I think that this movie does justice to both stories, converting them into a single story rather smoothly, and only leaving out things that will only really be missed by people who know the novels enough to be disappointed that certain things were not included. I, for example, would have loved to see the whole chess story in Through The Looking Glass included in the film (there certainly was time for it), where Alice travels through Wonderland on her quest to become a Queen herself, but I am more than happy with how this film turned out.

One of the only things that I noticed about this film that did not match up to the quality of the novels is that the books have so much more in them for adults than the movie does. There are so many tricks with language pulled in the books, such as in the conversations with Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum as well as several other characters, that it really makes you think about the English language as a game with which an endless variety of tricks can be played. In the film, this is hugely downplayed, even if only because it is done visually and the language tricks pass by so fast that kids are almost certain to miss them and even the most attentive of adults will have a hard time keeping up with them.

As a whole, however, Alice In Wonderland is so wildly entertaining that the loss of some of the literary substance does not detract from it as a terrific tale of adventure and discovery, certain to be enjoyed by people of all ages. I have heard plenty of rumours that Lewis Carroll was on any of a variety of drugs while he wrote the novels (and plenty of rumours that he wasn't on any drugs at all), but there are certainly some things in the books and in the movie that could have only been conjured up by the most, um, eccentric of imaginations. We may never know for sure, but at least we have some wonderful entertainment.

For a lot of people on this site, this is either one of few best Disney movies or one of the worst. There is about 40 animated Disney movies and my personal favourite will always be the mad world of Wonderland. I don't actually know why but to me this is what i always thought about as a child, a mad world where simply nothing made sense. It goes like dynamite at only seventy two minutes and in that they have an array of entertaining characters and fourteen entertaining songs. To me it is the genius of Disney creating an entertaining look at a child's world. I think it is because of the Jungle Book that this is not as popular as some of the Disney Classics but you can't help but smile when you watch the Queen of hearts and the Mad Hatter being their own creative self's in the wonder of this amazingly clever gem. 9/10