D52 Week 13: Alice in Wonderland!

Apparently, Walt Disney was just crazy about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. His first significant success as a film producer came with the short "Alice Comedies", before even Mickey Mouse and his more interesting friends. He very well could've even based his very first feature-length film on the stories, if not for the fact that Paramount released a live-action adaptation in 1933, which flopped, horribly. So, he revived the idea in the mid-1940s, featuring live-action Ginger Rogers interacting with cartoon characters, because the Alice stories are nothing if not the The Three Caballeros of Lewis Carroll's bibliography; after seeing this storyboarded out, though, Disney rejected the proposal upon realising that the Alice stories were, um, nothing, I guess. It took until 1951 to realise what he had finally deemed to be an acceptable adaptation! And I sure bet that was worth the wait, right??

The fact is, of course, that Lewis Carroll's literary voice is very much his own. Only Lewis Carroll would write the things Lewis Carroll wrote. And so, it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to adequately adapt either or both of those novels as a film of any sort. They are works whose verbal flair doesn't exactly benefit from visual flair, after all. And so Disney, um, decided to make the film mostly about visual flair, and not verbal flair very much at all. Our ostensible heroine, Alice, does little more than stumble from one unrelated musical setpiece to another. Because, you see, the Alice stories are nothing if not the Make Mine Music of Lewis Carroll's bibliography, you see!

Seriously, though. I had to watch six consecutive 1940s Disney package films, and from that experience it's clear that this is pretty much also one, just with a more tangible linking element. Most of Alice's time is spent standing on the sidelines, staying out of the way and watching more interesting characters sing songs. Don't get me wrong, the songs are really quite good! They're catchy, in the way that Disney songs should be, and are by far the best thing about the film. They're charming and character-based, unlike the cold, detached songs by Special Guest Performers that pervaded most of Disney's features from the 40s. I like them! That doesn't change the fact that they turned some truly great literature into the blandest possible type of Disney animated film, which they had already done to death less than a decade prior. From that perspective, it's kind of sad.

Like the musically inclined package films, these random disconnected bits vary in quality. The Cheshire Cat was certainly an intriguingly valid choice for the Obligatory Sterling Holloway Character; Ed Wynn's Mad Hatter is also good, so good in fact that Tim Burton selected him for the Obligatory Johnny Depp character in the remaquel, a......less valid choice. But, still. Here, they're both very interesting! Whereas I was less interested by the story of The Walrus and the Carpenter, a clever satirical allegory for the way that walruses enjoy seafood and carpenters like murdering things with their hammers. And the Queen of Hearts is, erm, an overwhelming success as a character I assume we were supposed to dislike? It's interesting that the King of Hearts, meanwhile, is presented as supposedly likeable for trying to save Alice from beheading, in his very meek way...yet he doesn't bat an eye at the countless castle servants who are sentenced to death for equally petty reasons. I suppose he wanted to avoid Amanda-Knox-esque international "intrigue". But I digress.

Interestingly, though, the fact that Alice in Wonderland actually has an honest-to-goodness narrative (of sorts) linking what would've been distinct shorts in the 1940s just serves to give it even less of an excuse for exhibiting one of the essential flaws of the idea of cobbling together a bunch of different, disconnected cartoon bits into full-length motion picture form. Namely, the fact there's just not enough here to ground the audience and carry them through these ever-changing scenarios. Again, Alice just mostly stands around while things happen to other people, so clearly she doesn't do much to help carry us through! Supposedly, no fewer than five different directors worked on different parts of the film, and it shows; the segments play more like each director going overboard to top the others with the unique characters of his part of the story, completely ignoring the fact that our alleged common thread, Alice, is actually supposed to be a living breathing organism as well. The few occasions where she decides to use her Mini-Mega powers only served to make me think, "Oh, hey, I almost forgot this chick was still here!" Great central character, guys.

If I may, for just a second, compare and contrast this to another supposed classic of "girl gets whisked away from boring real life into a dazzling fantasy world that makes her ultimately miss boring real life" cinema, The Wizard of Oz is perhaps on the very opposite end of the groundedness spectrum. If Dorothy spent maybe too much time questioning everything and being a clueless twit, Alice takes things in the opposite direction, barely reacting at all to the endless stream of fascinating logic-defying madness going on around her. The Wizard of Oz devotes an infamously long stretch of time in the beginning to demonstrating just how boring reality is, with its realistic black-and-white-ness; Alice in Wonderland's introduction to the real world consists of little more than Alice saying, "Oh, this book doesn't have pictures? Bo-ring! I'm outta here!", to paraphrase. This film is very eager to get to the meat of its story, clearly, but it doesn't benefit from the weird implication, when you add all this up, that its weirdness is somehow actually very mundane, to everyone.

Especially since, as everyone knows, surrealism is the name of the game here! Everyone loves surrealism, or at least everyone worthwhile does. When it's slathered on this thickly, with such a weirdly disaffected tone, though, that surrealism ceases to be surreal, and Alice's story loses its sole reason to exist, really. Lewis Carroll is Lewis Carroll; not just anybody can be Lewis Carroll, dammit! If memory serves, the 1950s mark a period where Disney returns to the animated feature proper, but on shakier creative ground than they were when they first started, creating a string of films that are cute enough, but lack any real sense of impact. Alice in Wonderland seems to fall firmly within that description. Hell, I'd argue that the bizarre, feverish finale to The Three Caballeros, with Donald Duck tripping balls on sexy Latin lady kisses and being killed by bulls made of dynamite and so on, comes across as more surreal, solely because it was far more willing to actually embrace the sheer weirdness of its weirdness.

...so maybe the Alice stories actually are the The Three Caballeros of Lewis Carroll's bibliography after all! Well, I'm certainly glad we got that cleared up.

Coincidentally, this comic was drawn while kinda-sorta-recovering from a kinda-sorta-head-injury. For realsies!

TERRIBLE AND HORRIBLE AND UNACCEPTABLE DIRECT-TO-DVD DISNEY SEQUEL CONCEPT UNIT: In Alice in Twoderland, sadly, Alice merely returns to Onederland, despite the title's tantalizing implications, upon receiving a letter in the mail informing her that she has been exonerated of her previous crimes against the Queen of Hearts, who has shuffled off this mortal coil, by order of her successor. However, Alice quickly manages to get in legal trouble again, thanks to her very British lack of rhythm of any sort, which angers the new monarch - the terrifying Queen of Clubs, whose only dream is to fill the kingdom with mediocre dance pop (as performed by China Anne McClain).