| Alice in Wonderland | |
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1951 release poster |
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| Directed by | Clyde Geronimi Wilfred Jackson Hamilton Luske |
| Produced by | Walt Disney |
| Written by | Winston Hibler Ted Sears Bill Peet Erdman Penner Joe Rinaldi Milt Banta William Cottrell Dick Kelsey Joe Grant Dick Huemer Del Connell Tom Oreb John Walbridge |
| Based on | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: Lewis Carroll |
| Starring | Kathryn Beaumont Ed Wynn Richard Haydn Sterling Holloway Jerry Colonna Verna Felton J. Pat O'Malley Bill Thompson Heather Angel Joseph Kearns |
| Music by | Oliver Wallace |
| Editing by | Lloyd L. Richardson |
| Studio | Walt Disney Productions |
| Distributed by | RKO Radio Pictures (Theatrical) |
| Release date(s) | July 26, 1951 (United Kingdom) July 28, 1951 (United States) |
| Running time | 75 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3 million |
| Box office | $7.789 million |
Alice in Wonderland is a 1951 American animated feature produced by Walt Disney and based primarily on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with a few additional elements from Through the Looking-Glass. Thirteenth in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film was released in New York City and London on July 29, 1951 by RKO Radio Pictures. The film features the voices of Kathryn Beaumont (who also voiced Wendy Darling in the 1953 Disney Peter Pan) as Alice, and Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter.
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On the bank of a tranquil English river, a young woman named Alice gets tired of her older sister's retelling of the history of William I of England. When her sister chastises Alice's daydreaming, Alice tells her cat Dinah that she would prefer to live in a nonsenscial dreamland called Wonderland. Alice and Dinah spot a waistcoat-wearing White Rabbit passing by, and Alice gives chase as he rushes off claiming to be late for an unknown event. Alice follows him into a rabbit hole and falls into a labyrinth. Her dress balloons out and she begins to float. She sees the White Rabbit disappear into a tiny door and tries to follow, but the door's talking knob advises her to alter her size using a mysterious drink and food. Alice eventually manages to shrink and passes through the door's keyhole and into Wonderland. She meets several strange characters including the Dodo and Tweedledee and Tweedledum who recount the tale of "The Walrus and the Carpenter."
Alice eventually finds the White Rabbit in his house, but before she can ask what he is late for, she is sent to fetch some gloves. She eats a cake and grows into a giant again, getting stuck in the rabbit's house. The White Rabbit, the Dodo, and chimney sweep Bill the Lizard believe Alice to be a monster and plot to burn the house down. Alice escapes by eating a carrot and shrinking down to the size of an insect. She meets and sings with some talking flowers, but they chase her away upon accusing her of being a weed. Alice is then instructed by the hookah-smoking Caterpillar to eat a part of his mushroom grow back to her original size. Alice decides to keep the remaining pieces of the mushroom on hand.
Alice meets the Cheshire Cat who advises her to visit the Mad Hatter, March Hare and the Dormouse. The three are hosting a mad tea party and celebrate Alice's "unbirthday", a day where it is not her birthday. The White Rabbit appears, but the March Hare and Mad Hatter destroy his pocketwatch and throw him out of the party. Alice gives up on her pursuit of the White Rabbit and decides to go home, but gets lost in the Tulgey Wood. The Cheshire Cat appears and leads Alice into a giant hedge maze ruled by the tyrannical Queen of Hearts and her smaller husband, the King of Hearts. The Queen executes anyone who enrages her, and invites Alice in a bizarre croquet match using flamingoes and hedgehogs as the equipment.
The Cheshire Cat appears again and pulls a trick on the Queen which she accuses Alice of doing, and Alice is put on trial. However, she eats the remains of the Caterpillar's mushroom and grows to an enormous height which the King claims is forbidden in court. Tired of Wonderland, Alice openly insults the Queen until she shrinks to her normal size and is forced to flee after the Queen orders her execution. Alice becomes pursued by most of Wonderland's characters until she finally reunites with the Doorknob. The Doorknob tells her she is having a dream, forcing Alice to wake herself up. The film ends as Alice and her sister head home for tea.
The history of Walt Disney's association with Lewis Carroll's Alice books (Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass) stretches all the way back to 1923, when Disney was still a 21-year-old filmmaker trying to make a name for himself in Kansas City. When his first series of short cartoons, the Newman Laugh-O-Grams, failed to recoup production costs, the struggling young producer tried to create other short films hoping that one of them would point the way forward. The last of these Kansas City works was called Alice's Wonderland, featuring a live action girl (Virginia Davis) interacting with cartoon characters. While charming, the short failed to receive much notice, and so Walt Disney decided to abandon producing animated films, and left Kansas City to become a live-action film director in Hollywood.
After months of trying, and failing, to find work in live-action, Disney partnered with his older brother Roy to create the Disney Brothers Studio, and they revived the idea of producing animated shorts. The independent distributor M. J. Winkler screened Walt's 1923 Alice short and found it promising, so Winkler agreed to distribute a series of Alice Comedies for the Disney brothers. Jubilant, Walt contacted his former Kansas City colleagues and brought them to Hollywood to work on the new series (a group that today reads like a who's who of American animation legends, including Ub Iwerks, Rudolph Ising, Isadore "Friz" Freleng, and Hugh Harman). From 1924 to 1926, the Disney Brothers Studio produced over fifty short Alice Comedies. The success of this silent film series established Disney as a film producer, and was probably significant for the success of the later Mickey Mouse, usually credited as the first great Disney success.
Walt Disney had a long-standing affection for Alice in Wonderland. For instance, as soon as he began discussing making feature-length films, he returned repeatedly to the idea of making a feature-length version of Alice, but for various reasons, these attempts were never realized. Prior to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney planned on making Alice in Wonderland his first feature-length film instead. Like the early Alice Comedies, he planned on using a combination of live-action and animation for the "wonderland" sequences, and in early 1933, a Technicolor screen test was shot with Mary Pickford as Alice. This first attempt by Disney at producing an Alice feature was eventually tabled when Paramount released their own 1933 live-action version, with a script by Cleopatra director Joseph Mankiewicz (brother of Citizen Kane (1941) scribe Herman J. Mankiewicz) and a cast that included Gary Cooper as the White Knight, Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, and W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.
Disney did not abandon the idea of making an Alice feature. After the enormous success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – as Leonard Maltin writes in his history of Walt Disney's film career, The Disney Films, Walt Disney officially recorded the title Alice in Wonderland with the MPAA in 1938. As preparatory work began on this possible "Alice" feature, the economic devastation of the Second World War as well as the demands of the productions of Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), and Bambi (1942) pushed the "Alice" project aside. After the war, in 1945, Disney proposed a live-action/animated version of Alice in Wonderland that would star Ginger Rogers and would utilize the techniques seen in Disney's The Three Caballeros (1944). This, too, fell through, and in 1946, work began on an all-animated version of Alice in Wonderland that would feature art direction heavily based on the famous illustrations of Sir John Tenniel. This version was storyboarded, but was ultimately rejected by Walt, as was yet another proposed live-action/animated version of Alice that would star Luanna Patten (seen in Disney's Song of the South (1946) and So Dear to My Heart (1948)).
The film cost $3,000,000, $21 million in 2010, so Alice in Wonderland was a slightly low budget film. In the late 1940s, work resumed on an all-animated Alice with a focus on comedy, music and spectacle as opposed to rigid fidelity to the books, and finally, in 1951, Walt Disney released a feature-length version of Alice in Wonderland to theaters, eighteen years after first discussing ideas for the project and almost thirty years after making his first Alice Comedy. Disney's final version of Alice in Wonderland followed in the traditions of his feature films like Fantasia and The Three Caballeros in that Walt Disney intended for the visuals and the music to be the chief source of entertainment, as opposed to a tightly-constructed narrative like Snow White or Cinderella (1950). Instead of trying to produce an animated "staged reading" of Carroll's books, Disney chose to focus on their whimsy and fantasy, using Carroll's prose as a beginning, not as an end unto itself.
Another choice was decided upon for the look of the film. Rather than faithfully reproducing the famous illustrations of Sir John Tenniel, a more streamlined and less complicated approach was used for the design of the main characters. Background artist Mary Blair took a Modernist approach to her design of Wonderland, creating a world that was recognizable, and yet was decidedly "unreal." Indeed, Blair's bold use of color is one of the film's most notable features.
Finally, in an effort to retain some of Carroll's imaginative verses and poems, Disney commissioned top songwriters to compose songs built around them for use in the film. A record number of potential songs were written for the film, based on Carroll's verses—over 30—and many of them found a way into the film, if only for a few brief moments. Alice in Wonderland would boast the greatest number of songs included in any Disney film, but because some of them last for mere seconds (like "How Do You Do and Shake Hands," "We'll Smoke the Monster Out," "'Twas Brillig," "The Caucus Race," and others), this fact is frequently overlooked. The original song that Alice was to sing in the beginning was titled "Beyond the Laughing Sky". The song, like so many other dropped songs, was not used by the producers. However, the composition was kept and the lyrics were changed. It later became the title song for Peter Pan (which was in production at the same time), "The Second Star to the Right".
The title song, composed by Sammy Fain, was later adopted by jazz pianist Bill Evans and featured on his Sunday at the Village Vanguard.
All of these creative decisions were met with great criticism from fans of Lewis Carroll, as well as from British film and literary critics who accused Disney of "Americanizing" a great work of English literature.[1] 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, the film met with a lukewarm response at the box office and was a sharp disappointment in its initial release.[2] Though not an outright disaster, the film was never re-released theatrically in Walt Disney's lifetime, airing instead every so often on network television. In fact, Alice in Wonderland aired as the second episode of Walt Disney's Disneyland TV series on ABC in 1954, in a severely edited version cut down to less than an hour. In The Disney Films, Leonard Maltin relates 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."[3] Walt Disney himself felt that the film failed because Alice the character had no "heart."
Almost two decades after its original release, after the North American success of George Dunning's animated feature Yellow Submarine (1968), Disney's version of Alice in Wonderland suddenly found itself in vogue with the times. In fact, because of Mary Blair's art direction and the long-standing association of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland with the drug culture, the feature was re-discovered as something of a "head film" (along with Fantasia and The Three Caballeros) among the college-aged and was shown in various college towns across the country. The Disney company resisted this association, and even withdrew prints of the film from universities, but then, in 1974, the Disney company gave Alice in Wonderland its first theatrical re-release ever, and the company even promoted it as a film in tune with the "psychedelic" times (mostly from the hit song "White Rabbit" performed by Jefferson Airplane). This re-release was successful enough to warrant a subsequent re-release in 1981.
Later, with the advent of the home video market, the Disney company chose to make Alice in Wonderland one of the first titles available for the rental market on VHS and Beta and for retail sale on RCA's short-lived CED Videodisc format. The film was released on October 15, 1981 on VHS, CED Videodisc, and Betamax and May 28, 1986 on VHS, Betamax, and Laserdisc in the Walt Disney Classics, (though it was mastered for tape in 1985), staying in general release ever since, with a 40th Anniversary video release in 1991 (this and the 1986 video release were in Disney's Classics Collection), and again on October 28, 1994 on VHS and Laserdisc in the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection, and finally in 1999 (these two were in the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection.) It was released on DVD in Region 2 on July 13, 1999 and in Region 1 on July 4, 2000 (under the Gold Classic Collection DVD series). A fully restored 1.33:1 ratio two-disc "Masterpiece Edition" was released in 2004, including the full hour-long episode of the Disney television show with Kathryn Beaumont, Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, Bobby Driscoll and others that promoted the film, computer games, deleted scenes, songs and related materials, which went back on moratorium in January 2009. Disney released a 2-disc Special "Un-Anniversary" Edition DVD on March 30, 2010 in order to promote the new Tim Burton Film.[4] The movie was released in a Blu-ray/DVD combo on February 1, 2011 to celebrate its 60th Anniversary.[5]
On the film aggregator website, Rotten Tomatoes, the overall rating of the film is a "fresh" 80% from 25 critical reviews.[6]
This motion picture received an Academy Award nomination for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, but it lost to An American in Paris.[7]
The film soundtrack was first released on LP record on July 28, 1951. The soundtrack was re-released on Audio CD by Walt Disney Records on February 3, 1998.[10]
Songs in the film
Songs written for film but not used
Alice in Wonderland has been condensed into a one act stage version entitled, Alice and 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 owned 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.
In Donald in Mathmagic Land, Donald Duck wears Alice's dress and has her hairstyle but brown not blond. A larger pencil bird is in the film as well. Alice and several other characters from the film were featured as guests in House of Mouse, and the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts were two of the villains featured in Mickey's House of Villains. The Mad Hatter was also featured in Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare were also featured in several episodes of Bonkers. Bill the Lizard, Tweedledum, Cheshire Cat, the doorknob, and an orange-colored version of one of the bulb-horn birds also appear in the 1988 Disney film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In the opening of Aladdin the peddler tries to sell a hookah much like the one the Caterpillar used. In Aladdin and the King of Thieves, the Genie turns into the White Rabbit. In Darkwing Duck, there is a villain called Tuskernini, a character that resembles the walrus in some ways. Weebo shows clips of the movie on her screen in Flubber. An episode Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, entitled "Mickey's Adventures in Wonderland", is based on the film.
Costumed versions of Alice, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts, the Walrus, Tweedledum and Tweedledee make regular appearances at the Disney theme parks and resorts, and other characters from the film (including the Walrus and the March Hare) have featured in the theme parks. More famously, all five Disneyland-style theme parks feature Mad Tea Party, a teacups ride based on Disney's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
Alice in Wonderland is also frequently featured in many parades and shows in the Disney Theme Parks, including The Main Street Electrical Parade, SpectroMagic, Fantasmic, Dreamlights, The Move It! Shake It! Celebrate It! Street Party and Walt Disney's Parade of Dreams. Disneyland contains a dark ride based on the film in addition to the teacups,[11] and Disneyland Paris also contains a hedge maze called Alice's Curious Labyrinth, which takes its inspiration from the film.[12] The now-defunct Mickey Mouse Revue, shown at Walt Disney World and later at Tokyo Disneyland, contained characters and scenes from the film.
A video game version of the film was released on Game Boy Color by Nintendo of America on October 4, 2000 in North America. Additionally, in the video games Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, Wonderland is a playable world. Alice is also a major character in the overall plot of the first game due to her role as one of seven "Princesses Of Heart". Other characters from the movie that appear include The Queen of Hearts, The Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, the Doorknob,the Caterpillar (V-cast only), and the Deck of Cards. The Mad Hatter and the March Hare appear in portrait form as well. All except the Doorknob also appear in Chain of Memories, albeit in the form of illusions made from the main character's memory.[13] While the world is absent in Kingdom Hearts II, it returns in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days and Kingdom Hearts coded, the latter featuring a digitized version of the world originating from data in Jiminy Cricket's royal journal. In Disney's Villains' Revenge the Queen of Hearts is one of the villains who tries to turn the ending to her story to where she finally cuts off Alice's head. In Toy Story 3: The Video Game the Mad Hatter's hat is one of the hats you can have the townsfolk wear. Mickey Mousecapade features various characters from the film. The Japanese version, in fact, is based very heavily on the film, with almost every reference in the game coming from the film.
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