Alice in Wonderland (1951 film)
Alice in Wonderland is a 1951 American animated musical fantasy comedy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. It is based on Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass. The production was supervised by Ben Sharpsteen, and was directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. With the voices of Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn, Richard Haydn, Sterling Holloway, Jerry Colonna, Verna Felton, J. Pat O'Malley, Bill Thompson, and Heather Angel, the film follows a young girl Alice who falls down a rabbit hole to enter a nonsensical world Wonderland that is ruled by the Queen of Hearts, while encountering strange creatures, including the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat.
Alice in Wonderland
- Winston Hibler
- Ted Sears
- Bill Peet
- Erdman Penner
- Joe Rinaldi
- Milt Banta
- Bill Cottrell
- Dick Kelsey
- Joe Grant
- Dick Huemer
- Del Connell
- Tom Oreb
- John Walbridge
Lloyd Richardson
75 minutes
United States
English
$3 million[2]
- $2.4 million (1951, domestic)
- $3.5 million (1974, domestic)
Walt Disney first tried to adapt Alice into a feature-length animated feature film in the 1930s starring Mary Pickford as Alice, but were scrapped in favor of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). However, the idea was eventually revived in the 1940s, following the success of Snow White. The film was originally intended to be a live-action/animated film, but Disney decided it would be the fully animated feature film. During its production, many sequences adapted from Carroll's books were later omitted, such as Jabberwocky, the White Knight, the Duchess, Mock Turtle and the Gryphon.
When it premiered at the Leicester Square Theatre in London on July 26, 1951, and in New York City on July 28, Alice in Wonderland was considered a disappointment, and 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 reviews on its initial release, it has been more positively reviewed over the years, being regarded as one of Disney's best animated films today.
Plot[edit]
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 "Caucus 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 and she begins to cry along with many forest creatures, which vanish.
The Cheshire Cat reappears to the despondent Alice and offers a path to the hot-headed Queen of Hearts, the only one in Wonderland 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 beheading 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 execution, 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 execution, 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 returns home for tea with her sister.
Directing animators are:[10]
Production[edit]
Early development[edit]
Walt Disney was familiar with Lewis Carroll's Alice books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), having read them as a schoolboy.[11] In 1923, while working at the Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, he produced a short film titled Alice's Wonderland,[12] which was loosely inspired by the Alice books and featured a live-action girl (Virginia Davis) interacting with an animated world.[13] Faced with business problems, the Laugh-O-Gram Studio went bankrupt in July of that year,[14] and the film was never released to the general public.[15] However, when Disney left for Hollywood, he used Alice's Wonderland to show to potential distributors.[16] By October 1923, Margaret J. Winkler of Winkler Pictures agreed to distribute the Alice Comedies series, and Disney partnered with his older brother Roy to form the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, which was later re-branded Walt Disney Productions;[17] he also re-hired his Kansas City co-workers, including Ub Iwerks, Rudolph Ising, Friz Freleng, Walker and Hugh Harman, to work on the series.[18] Alice Comedies began in 1924 before being retired in 1927.[19]
By June 1932, Roy Disney was first interested in acquiring the film rights to the Alice books, which, as he learned, were in the public domain.[20] In March 1933,[21] Mary Pickford approached Walt with a proposal for a feature-length adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, which would combine Pickford's live-action performance of the title role with an animated Wonderland supplied by the Disney studio.[22] Disney was hesitant about the idea,[23] and the project was quickly scrapped, after Paramount Pictures secured the film rights for their own live-action version.[20] In 1936, Disney produced the Mickey Mouse short film Thru the Mirror, which was based on Carroll's second Alice novel, Through the Looking-Glass, featuring Mickey Mouse going through a mirror into a world where all the items in his house become alive.[24]
Reception[edit]
Box office[edit]
During its initial theatrical run, the film grossed $2.4 million in domestic rentals.[79] Because of the film's production budget of $3 million, the studio wrote off a million-dollar loss.[2] During its theatrical re-release in 1974, the film grossed $3.5 million in domestic rentals.[80]
Critical reaction[edit]
Despite being regarded as one of Disney's best animated films today,[81] the initial reviews for Alice in Wonderland were 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."[67] 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."[82]
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."[83] 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."[84] Writing for /Film, Miyako Pleines says "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."[81]
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.[85] Walt Disney was not surprised by the critical reception to Alice in Wonderland as his version of Alice was intended for large family audiences, not literary critics. Additionally, the film was met with a lukewarm response at the box office.[86] Additionally, he remarked that the film failed because it lacked heart.[87] 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-canceling effect on the final product."[88]
On the film aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Alice in Wonderland received an approval rating of 84% from 32 critical reviews with an average rating of 6.80/10. 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."[89] Another film review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 based on top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a score of 68 based on 10 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[90]
Legacy[edit]
Stage version[edit]
Alice in Wonderland has been condensed into a one-act stage version entitled, Alice in Wonderland, Jr. The stage version is solely meant for middle and high school productions and includes the majority of the film's songs and others including Song of the South's "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah", two new reprises of "I'm Late!", and three new numbers entitled "Ocean of Tears", "Simon Says", and "Who Are You?" respectively. This 60–80 minute version is licensed by Music Theatre International in the Broadway, Jr. Collection along with other Disney Theatrical shows such as Disney's Aladdin, Jr., Disney's Mulan, Jr., Beauty and the Beast, Disney's High School Musical: On Stage!, Elton John and Tim Rice's Aida, and many more. Since 2018, it is no longer available to license.[93]