The revival in fortunes that seemed to be underway for Disney after the success of Cinderella (1950) faltered slightly with the company’s thirteenth feature animation, a long-in-gestation adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Regarded now in some quarters as one of the company’s best – it’s far from that – it opened to public indifference and critical disdain. Even Walt Disney himself expressed disappointment with the finished film, claiming somewhat disingenuously that he’d never wanted to make it in the first place – indeed it was never re-released theatrically while he was alive and instead turned up on the small screen as the second episode of Walt Disney’s Disneyland in 1954.
Disney already had form with the character of Alice – she’d appeared in a series of live-action and animated shorts in the 1920s, 57 of them released under the banner Alice Comedies with Virginia Davis, Margie Gray, Lois Hardwick and, for one film only, Dawn O’Day playing Alice in an animated Wonderland. Walt had made an earlier short adaptation of the book, simply titled Alice’s Wonderland, in 1923, also starring Davis in what was a sort of “pilot” for the Alice Comedies that began the following years after the financial collapse of producers Laugh-O-Gram. He’d wanted to adapt the book properly (and its sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass) in 1933 as a feature-length live/animated hybrid with Mary Pickford in the lead but decided to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) instead – the release of Norman Z. McLeod’s star-studded version in 1933 wouldn’t have helped much either.
When he finally made the film – he’d bought the rights to the books in 1938 – there was much outcry among Carroll purists who objected to the “Disneyfication” of the story and while purists can often be annoyingly pedantic, in this instance they may have had a point. The film retains the episodic nature of the book, but lacks the whimsy and wit, replacing them with too much slapstick, though there are many things to admire about, most of them to do with the visuals. The wordplay is mostly gone but the film brings a touch of psychedelic surrealism to some sequences that still look marvellous all these years later.
But the film also looks and feels even more episodic than the book – three different directors (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske) worked on the film, not in itself an uncommon practice for Disney, but this time it really does feel like the work of three different sets of hands with three different sensibilities not always pulling in the same direction. Some of the vignettes, most egregiously the Walrus and the Carpenter sequence, feel like they were short films that were somehow crowbarred into a longer storyline. It’s not hard to see where one director takes over the reins from another, something that you can’t say about any of their other animated films. Ward Kimball, who worked on the film as a directing animator, later told Leonard Maltin in his book The Disney Films that he put the blame for the film’s poor performance squarely on the shoulders of the directors – “Here was a case of five [sic] 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.”
It looks marvellous – the animators pushed their craft further than ever before with some beautifully designed and framed scenes. And it’s not just the weirdness that lingers but small moments, like an effective shot near the start where Alice reclines in the grass and flowers waft around in the breeze in the foreground lending the shot a real sense of depth. But it is the surreal moments – not all of them derived from Carroll – that gave the film a new lease of life. Despite being shown occasionally on television, it was rediscovered in the late 1960s by regulars at America’s large college cinema circuit who, under the influence of their psychedelic of choice, started screening it for a new, stoned generation who lapped up the oddball imagery. It grew in popularity such that in 1974, Disney finally re-issued it to cinemas and its rehabilitation was under way.
In truth though, it’s really not all that great beyond any nostalgia for it lingering from childhood. As a Disney animation, it’s perfectly acceptable, beautifully drawn and animated, but as an adaptation of Carroll it all rather misses the point. There are some fine moments though not really enough of them. The sequence with the hookah-pipe smoking caterpillar is particularly trippy (you can see why those 70s kids warmed to it…) and some of the business with the Queen of Hearts is wonderfully bizarre. The standout sequence is probably the deranged tea party moment with Ed Wynn, Jerry Colonna and Jimmy MacDonald clearly having much fun as the Mad Hatter, March Hare and Dormouse respectively. But such moments are few and far between and it ultimately becomes more of a chore to sit through that it should be. To add insult to injury, although the title song became a jazz standard, there’s a marked lack of decent tunes here.
Alice in Wonderland isn’t a patch on Cinderella but the company was back on track again with their next animated feature, the much more fun Peter Pan (1953). Disney returned to Wonderland as part of their programme of remaking its animated films in live(ish) action (they relied very heavily on CGI) films when they allowed Tm Burton to make a new adaptation in 2010 with Mia Wasikowska in the lead. It wasn’t particularly well received but Disney stuck with it and replaced Tim Burton with James Bobin for the sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) which was met with even worse reviews and poorer box office. As of 2021, streaming service Disney+ are preparing a spin off for the Cheshire Cat and a new television series titled Alice’s Wonderland Bakery is due on Disney Junior in 2022.
Crew
Directors: Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, Wilfred Jackson; Copyright MCMLI [1951] Walt Disney Productions; Walt Disney presents a Walt Disney production; Distributed by: RKO Radio Pictures, Inc.; Production Supervision: Ben Sharpsteen; Story: Winston Hibler, Ted Sears, Bill Peet, Erdman Penner, Joe Rinaldi, Milt Banta, Bill Cottrell, Dick Kelsey, Joe Grant, Dick Heumer, Del Connell, Tom Oreb, John Walbridge; An adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; Directing Animators: Milt Kahl, Ward Kimball, Frank Thomas, Eric Larson, John Lounsbery, Ollie Johnston, Wolfgang Reitherman, Marc Davis, Les Clark, Norm Ferguson; Character Animators: Hal King, Don Lusk, Judge Whitaker, Cliff Nordberg, Hal Ambro, Harvey Toombs, Bill Justice, Fred Moore, Phil Duncan, Marvin Woodward, Bob Carlson, Hugh Fraser, Charles Nichols; Effects Animators: Josh Meador, George Rowley, Dan MacManus, Blaine Gibson; Film Editor: Lloyd Richardson; Musical Score by: Oliver Wallace; Sound Director: C.O. Slyfield; Special Processes: Ub Iwerks
Voices
Ed Wynn (Mad Hatter); Richard Haydn (Caterpillar); Sterling Holloway (Cheshire Cat); Jerry Colonna (March Hare); Verna Felton (Queen of Hearts); Pat O’Malley (Walrus-Carpenter, Dee and Dum); Bill Thompson (White Rabbit and Dodo); Heather Angel (Alice’s sister); Kathryn Beaumont (Alice); Joseph Kearns (Doorknob); Larry Grey (Bill); Queenie Leonard (bird in the tree); Dink Trout (King of Hearts); Doris Lloyd (the rose); James MacDonald (Dormouse); The Mellomen [Don Barclay, Bill Lee, Thurl Ravenscroft, Max Smith, Bob Stevens ] (card painters); Don Barclay; Pinto Colvig [flamingoes – uncredited]; Stan Freberg [uncredited]
The EOFFTV Review 