Alice in Wonderland is Walt Disney’s most subversive animated movie.
First observation: oh. Would you look at that. The 4th of July is upon us. The very day upon which Alice’s Adventures were first conceived on a rowboat trip down the river Thames.
Second observation: Oh. Would you look at that (again). The Walt Disney company is celebrating 100 years of existence by hyping up and/or remaking the most popular animated movies of their back catalogue.
Third observation (again, totally not relevant at all): Alice’s original actor Kathryn Beaumont is set to briefly unretire for a special guest appearance in Season 2 of Disney Junior’s Wonderland Bakery later this year.
Not that I necessarily need a planet-aligning event as an excuse to talk about Alice in Wonderland again since the last time I did so on my Medium page, but it’s certainly the best source of motivation I’ve had. Ever since I mentioned briefly in my first piece the Walt adaptation’s aim of “deliriously upending Disney’s own ‘dreams come true’ formula just as the classic Lewis Carroll books did to the moral-driven Wonder Tales of old”, I’ve felt the desire to elaborate on that a bit (okay, a lot). Long before I dug deep into the history behind the film’s production to try and put my impressions of the movie into words, this film always struck me as very “anti-Disney”. Something about Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, especially when viewing it with a fresh perspective back in 2010, felt so atypical of their established style, despite sharing some baseline commonalities.
With these thoughts about to froth over after having marinaded for years, I figured it was about time I go over the ingredients list so as to assuage my angry customers.
…yeah, this analogy doesn’t work.
DISNEY DOES OPPOSITE OF THE THING! WHAT DOES IT MEAN? YOU’RE GONNA READ SOME WORDS NOW!
So…
Parody (or any work of fiction with parodic elements containing scenes designed to subvert expectations) is at its most basic level, lifted and carried by the phrase, “What if something ELSE happened instead?”
Parody will willingly and conciously go against audience expectations either to demonstrate how a given trope or expected action might prove incompatible with established conventions of logic, or to gradually build an internal logic all its own. Sometimes it can be used to place familiar characters into unfamiliar scenarios, or to extrapolate a more clear and meaningful intent designed to stand apart from the material being subverted (which is usually the point at which a parody crosses over into becoming full-blown satire). When one usually talks parody though, it will typically invoke or inspire laughter, mainly because it’s a topic ripe for mockery.
In short, an audience is led either by the work itself or their own preconceptions to expect a certain thing is going to happen…until it doesn’t.
Self-parody happens when a work derived from a broader subject or genre becomes aware of its own tropes or expectations and so, turns inside-out. Here, not even the fundamental laws of space and time can be safe from mockery and ridicule.
Walt Disney as it stands today is certainly no stranger to the conventions of parody, “self” or otherwise. In most of those cases however (Enchanted, Emperor’s New Groove, Olaf Presents etc.), parodic elements tend to be moreso peppered throughout their films as one-off jokes, or are intended to serve as a jumping off point for more traditional straight-faced narratives of virtuous good triumphing over powerful evil and/or redeeming a flawed antihero. The rest of those examples are either short disconnected vignettes designed to explore the limits of animation as a medium…or they’re Alice in Wonderland.
In my assessment, there is simply no other film in the annals of Disney’s theatrical animated releases quite like it. But again, what makes me say that this work is their most subversive of all? Let’s start with the fact that the trend-setting work upon which this film has been based was (and in my assessment, still is) deeply parodic.
In July 1862, math teacher and archdeacon Charles Lutwidge Dodgson made up a story on the spot to entertain three of his associates’ children during an otherwise unassuming rowboat trip. The story he told of a little girl stumbling all by herself into a backwards underground world where nothing and nobody followed their own rules was considered so entertaining that he was pressured by the children and his own friends to write it down in full before publishing it three years later under the pen name of Lewis Carroll.
Carroll loved more than anything to poke fun at broad ideals whether they were fully entrenched in established convention like photography and olde English mythical poetry or if those ideals were only just starting to gain popularity in public conciousness such as back garden sports and (gasp!) negative numbers. Even his writing and prose in exhange with close colleagues was littered with winks and nudges, which extends to the stories he told and the ways he told them. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was no exception: instead of starting in the trappings of a timeless moralistic fantasy setting, we have a very modern and ordinary young girl who is thrust headfirst into a world in which everyone claimed to know everything despite clearly having no clue of what they were doing, even as they did everything they could to exert power on this child whose supposed guidance or memorised teachings either hold zero weight or have the opposite intended effect.
Back in Alice’s times, the people of Britain had just emerged coughing and spluttering from the soot-addled plumes of the industrial revolution: children were now getting a proper education instead of being stuffed up chimneys or fed into steam-powered lathes. They were getting pictures taken, spoiled with toys and being given step-by-step nursery rhyme guides on how to become morally upstanding model citizens of jolly-old England-land.
There was one thing that Lewis Carroll objected to, and which probably made him best suited to the role of a children’s entertainer: kids were being told what to do and how to think without much meaningful elaboration as to why. Curiosity is arguably how people learn and develop best and this instinct was being shunned from a very early age in order to send kids on the fast-track towards adulthood and marriage when they’d just barely become teenagers. Carroll’s intention in developing his story of Wonderland as a twisted parody of Victorian English customs was to encourage his readership to embrace curiosity, to take back that important piece of childhood mental development before they lost it forever.
(Put a post-it note reminder on this part because it’s going to become very relevant again in a minute)
Anyway.
As I spoke about in my first Medium article about the original books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass entered a new canon of fantasy literature, only to gradually become vaguely aligned in the public conciousness with the very works it was originally making a mockery of in the first place. Enter cartoonist Walt Disney: plumber of folk myth, fairy tales, popular fiction and the public domain. He made a name for his studio by repackaging classic stories and iconography for the purposes of building a brand identity rooted firmly in the virtues of truth, strength and friendship.
He held up Alice’s Adventures as one of his all-time favourites and chose it as one of his first candidates for a full-length feature premiere, even going so far as to acquire the film rights for the book’s original illustrations. However, while retrofitting this story was no problem for Walt in the pre-technicolor days when animation was still young, his ‘Alice Comedies’ still yet to bump up against any serious story limitations, it proved far more difficult (compared to the likes of Snow White or Pinnochio) when he tried transplanting the story almost one-to-one for a feature-length release.
The sticking point for him was in finding the “whimsy” that captured his own imagination as a child. His first spirited attempt followed the premiere of Snow White with storyboards by David Hall depicting a narrative that, had it made it to the silver screen, would have been carried almost entirely by its animation and little else. Scenes and vignettes come and go with Alice being whisked off from one creatively ambitious setpiece to another, only without the gradually building throughline of childhood rebellion and laser-focused parody that ran through the original books.
A second attempt was started in the following decade, this time beginning with a treatment by Brave New World writer Aldous Huxley (not even kidding there). This version was planned to have been a live-action animation hybrid similar to Mary Poppins or Bedknobs & Broomsticks, involving a rose-tinted version of the real life Alice’s relationship with Lewis Carroll as they both used Wonderland as their reprive from reality when life with stuffy suits and overbearing nannies got too hard for them. Huxley’s attempt had the opposite problem to David Hall’s storyboards, in that there was seemingly too much story to follow and not enough of that essential “whimsy” he was so eager to capture. In addition, there was the problem of translating the book’s original etched illustrations to animation, which proved too costly and headache inducing, even with how far animation had evolved since the 1920s.
Eventually, after extensive workshopping and even an entire Wonderland-centric study program in search of that elusive “whimsy”, Disney decided to eschew the book illustrations along with the two initial drafts and settle on a more narratively straightforward version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ that ended up polarising critics and audiences upon release in 1951. Bones of contention were chewed upon relating to the overly saturated art direction that deviated so heavily from the book’s illustrations of Sir John Tenniel, as to seem almost completely alien to fans of the source material. Ideas and characters from the books were liberally altered, replaced, chopped up or mashed together. Alice’s sense of curiosity seemed to be driven more by a hollow thirst for adventure than a meaningful desire to untangle the ridiculous contraditions of established order. The script seemed to prioritise slapstick, goofball antics and western-friendly zingers over Lewis Carroll’s dense wordplay.
Even Walt Disney himself sided with the criticism later on, conceding that his adaptation “lacked heart” in retrospect, which is how most people relate the film’s production before proclaiming it “the black sheep” of Disney’s classic animated oeuvre, despite it eventually getting a second wind with the rise of “hippie” counterculture in the 1960s.
But none of that feels like a mistake or a stab in the back.
Alice in Wonderland is still talked about to this day alongside the Disney greats. Had Disney not been scared off by the release of Paramount Pictures’ own adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and gone through with his own version as the studio’s premiere feature, its approach to animated storytelling probably would have aged much worse than the version we know today. For some, this film has become their all-time favourite, even if the only thing that keeps them coming back to it are the visuals and the animation quality. I argue though, that there’s something else with Disney’s Alice that keeps these people coming back to it, even if they can’t quite explain why.
Remember that paragraph I told you to post-it note? Where I talked about Lewis Carroll poking fun at conventions and subverting expectations? This was the whimsy that Disney was trying to find.
Disney’s team knew exactly what they were doing, but they had to get it across in a different way. I would contend that the lack of “heart” which supposedly condemned Alice in Wonderland upon its release is what actually helps the film stand apart and maintain an audience so many years later. It’s not entirely down to the trippy visuals alone either; clearly there’s more substance here below Wonderland’s surface than just “Pink Elephants on Parade: The Extended Cut” and certainly way more than Tim Burton’s version, which actually feels more formulaic with very little introspection.
Bear in mind that until the initial release of the Alice film that audiences actually got to see in 1951, Disney’s output following Snow White played things relatively safe, maybe not in terms of their visual presentation, but certainly in terms of how it played out on the pages of a script. Being based on tales that had already built some significant prominence in popular culture, it was only natural that Walt’s repackaging of already popular stories would be designed to please as wide of an audience as possible through their affirming narratives. Even when moments in their stories became more harrowing than usual, there would always be a moment not long afterwards to offset it or reassure audiences that everything would always end up in their right places. The original Alice books were all about calling that very notion into question. Things won’t always add up or make sense, and when people refuse to acknowledge this, it’s imperative that it be pointed out loudly and clearly. Lewis Carroll consciously went against the grain to deliver a story that very overtly made fun of rote morality-hinged narratives and the society that created them as a tool to teach children.
It is inevitable then, that when Walt Disney decides to adapt such a parody after trading for so long in the narratives it parodies, that he will invariably be making fun of himself. He had to have known this after all that workshopping, or else he would have abandoned it completely so that some other producer at the compant to try their hand at it decades later.
So, how does a “traditional” Disney film play out and how does the animated Alice in Wonderland film subvert it to “whimsical” effect?
Here I go:
With Disney’s release of their theatrical Pinocchio adaptation in theatres, their recognisable style was transferred to the big features over from the Silly Symphonies short films, they having codified the Disney brand before they were phased out in favour of character-centric shorts featuring Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck (among others). Ten years later, Cinderella would follow a string of films that cobbled together multiple self-contained stories into “package” features and many subsequent Disney films would follow their examples all the way through the “rennaisance” era of the 1990s and beyond.
A film of this kind would typically start with a disembodied narrator or lone character laying out the scene for the audience, either by addressing them directly or loudly vocalising their innermost thoughts, as though speaking to an unseen third party. This is optionally preceded by a book being opened up to reveal some evocative imagery which serves as our establishing shot.
Alice in Wonderland has the evocative establishing shot down, zooming out from a river bank before panning to a frumpy woman reading a book off to the right: so far so standard, right? So, what if something else happened instead? This time, no wider narrative thrust is being related to the audience by Jimminy Cricket; this woman is just coldly dictating a dry history lesson to a visibly distracted young girl fooling around with her cat and a daisy chain on the tree branch above.
This is how it all starts!
Quickly, the woman’s firm reprimands are shrugged off as the girl’s distracted mind drowns out the still ongoing lecture and she quite literally gets up and walks away from the film’s own introduction.
Don’t worry though, it’s not all incidental details; let’s talk about something more substantial. When you ask anyone who grew up marinading in the classic Disney pantheon old and modern, what would they say makes a Disney film?
Songs, right?
They condense character’s feelings, establish settings or mood and work alongside spoken word and visual set pieces to develop plot in a format that is not only economical but also emotionally engrossing on top of being the highlight of any karaoke session. Disney has carved itself into the well worn stage show musical tradition of opening numbers, villain pieces, uppers, downers, ballads, ensembles and reprises.
But by far the most successful of these, the one that gets the hearts soaring along with the company’s profit margins is the “I want” song. In Disney’s case, it’s the “wish upon a star” number. It’s the all-essential point at which a character openly states their greatest desire that will drive them forward for the rest of the story. Snow White wants to settle down with someone who won’t keep trying to kill her for a change. Gepetto wants a child while Pinocchio and Jimminy Cricket want to prove themselves worthy of filling that empty hole in his life. Cinderlla wants to escape from the shadow of her oppressive step-family and catch the big break that she’s been slaving her way towards for so long. Wendy doesn’t want to grow up, Ariel wants to be where the people are, Tarzan wants to know about the strangers like him, Hercules wants to go the distance, BELLE WANTS ADVEEEENTURE IN THE GREEEEAT WIIIIDE SOMEWHEEEERE…!
Ahem.
Once the character has said their piece, an extremely circuitous opportunity will soon arise which affords them the chance to eventually make their wish come true by the end of the story, sometimes in ways they never expected, but always by proving themselves through determination and strength of character. Their need will be almost unwavering, a reflection of just how much of a difference this one wish could have on their lives if it comes to pass. If they don’t succeed, then all of their efforts will have been for nothing, their happily ever after will be abandoned forever and they might as well have been singing into a great big void.
So again, what if something else happened instead?
After walking away from her sister and frolicking with her cat Dinah in a bed of daisies, Alice wishes for a world of nonsense.
And that’s it.
She doesn’t even state why she wants it or how it would enrich her life: only that it would be a nice change of pace from reality. Her big wish is not a desperate need or want, it’s a “would like to have”. It’s not a desire, it’s a daydream. Where the wishes of most other Disney characters would be considered foolish or dangerous, they were at least tangible and attainable within the bounds of their respective universes. Alice’s wish isn’t just unfeasable, it’s literally impossible. By using up a whole song to state her complete nothing of a wish, she is essentially committing the highest form of Disney-branded sacrilege. These would seem like highly negative qualities in any other movie, but it takes on a completely different context when judged against the other movies in Disney’s own library, especially when we see what happens next. For her sins, the wishing star overseers cast upon poor Alice a terrible punishment:
They grant her wish instantly.
No effort needed, no proving of any worth, no great debt needing to be paid off or any grand sacrifice necessary. A white rabbit with pink eyes just waddles into view, staring at a pocket watch through a tiny pair of spectacles in its hand, having pulled it out of a perfectly fitted waistcoat while speaking to itself in a language that is unmistakably English.
From her tumble down the rabbit hole onward, her wish never stops getting granted. So much nonsense is thrown against the wall that Alice might be starting to think that maybe she really could be having too much of a good thing. It gets so out of hand so early on that it’s not long before she’s told to turn back: to abandon her wish while she still can. Tweedledee and Tweedledum arrive on the scene before the point of no return to share with Alice a story about the dangers of curiosity (in a way that in my opinion, preserves the sense of hilariously mean-spirited insanity brought across in Lewis Carroll’s own poetry).
Their warning naturally flies right over Alice’s head and for the rest of the movie, her motivation remains incredibly simple as she’s led by the nose on the promise of the ultimate destination that the rabbit is supposedly late for, which Alice has convinced herself must surely be some kind of party: the big payoff that all the surrounding nonsense presumably must be building towards. Whenever she gets to where the goal is supposed to be however, it’s already moved on from where she is in the moment, leading instead to multiple diversions in which much frustration and belittlement is lying in wait. Every attempt Alice makes to get along with the creatures she meets is met with friction or hostility and even when it does seem as though she’s about to get on good terms with them, the dodo becomes an arsonist, the flowers turn racist, someone’s watch gets utterly pulverised and relations will quickly turn sour, often through no genuine fault of her own.
the feeling that nobody actually wants me here..."The film can’t even be said to have an equivalent structure to Disney’s own similarly episodic package features of the 1940s; some scenes flow directly into eachother, others don’t. Some boast extensive songs with multiple interactions between characters, others don’t even last a minute. If every other Disney film is built on the phrase “make the effort and wishes will come true”, Alice in Wonderland directly contradicts all of that with “Be careful of what you wish for”.
But it’s not just the movie itself asking the “what if something else” question. Because now I’m goign to start writing about the creative approaches that were happening offscreen as well: not even a year after the release of Disney’s Cinderella, the method of portrayal for Wonderland’s contentuous characters seem to harken back to the earlier days of film production when actors were more commonly typecast for their specialised mannerisms and memtic gags or catchphrases, usually until they became old reliables for certain producers.
To be sure, this still happened often enough in later Disney films and the studio did have a well-worn stable of “old-reliables” that it would build up from the beginning, but even Alice in Wonderland itself grows weary of the notion of mere “type”. At just over the mid-way point, we are introduced to the Hatter and the Hare by which time, we are well beyond the likes of Billy Gilbert doing his well-worn and played-out sneeze routine for the role of Sneezy in Disney’s Snow White. At least there, he was still demonstrably playing a character with a personality and feelings that were unique to the film. Jerry Colonna as the March Hare exhibits all the same bug-eyed expressions and syllable-stretching mannerisms as his other movie roles, some of which he was also credited as the character of…himself. Seriously, his other most famous film appearance in ‘Road To Rio’ literally has him credited as just “Colonna”. Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter meanwhile is nigh-indistinguishable from the same Ed Wynn who plays an on-stage stand-up comedy routine for audiences across America.
Actually, this would give too much benefit of the doubt; they’re exactly the same, top hat, goofy lisp, tangled hair and all!
The vaudeville actors referenced for Pinocchio could likely never afford for anything to slip up the way things did for Wynn and Colonna when the lower quality reference audio from the Mad Tea Party scene proved more lively than the studio booth recording sessions, especially as they were let off their leashes to improvise their movements and even add a few lines of dialogue of their own nearly four decades before Robin William’s animated ad-lib turn as the Genie in Aladdin. Alice in Wonderland absolutely wears its cast’s one-note nature openly on its sleeve and far from condemning the production, it demonstrably seems to have liberated the animators who brought it to life.
Though the film relied entirely on reference shots for the main cast, its use of rotoscoping is demonstrably far less restrained than Cinderella’s which was produced alongside Alice in Wonderland. Even Alice herself isn’t animated entirely according to the standards of other Disney heroines: eyes scrunch, brows furrow, pupils dilate and the accurate recreation of Kathryn Beaumont’s performance can only barely retain its structural integrity as the wild and wacky scearios of the film threaten to send the whole structure into complete collapse.
That sense of sheer collapse is long past imminent when it comes to the pop-art character and environment design of Mary Blair, whose style completely envelops the film. Films like Pinnochio would usually try to at least create the suggestion of detail far off in the multi-planed parallax-scrolling distance to build a more convincing sense of cohesive space. There is no concious attempt at building cohesive space in Wonderland though, as not even one singular location in the current scene will remain completely the same between shots. Parts of Alice’s hazy dream world either fade into formless blobs or pockets of infinite black, all of which lend further to the overall impression that if something does not exist within Alice’s immediate periphery, then it could just as well be easily and silently replaced with anything else while she’s not looking.
Even the fairly grounded painterly art design shown off at the river bank near the sunny park that opened the film feels like a distant memory after it’s all but discarded not even four minutes in. At the very instant when Alice turns on the lampshade to dispel the darkness during her descent down the rabbit hole, the entire film gives way to a singular artistic vision.
Typically while working on any movie of a high enough budget, a unifying visual style will usually be hammered into shape by producers with input from multiple artists helping to steer the ship. In Mary Blair’s case, her minimalist art style had some mild influence on key scenes from Cinderella and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but this only really extended to the use of colour, a small handful of frames and a vague sense of atmosphere that most likely already came pre-established anyway. This all changed when Walt Disney ruled out the book illustrations as a main source of influence for his Alice film.
When it came to the art in his films, Walt would let people get away with a few surreal setpieces, but only if it aided the emotional impact at the core of a certain moment. At all other times, he was a staunch naturalist with a famous hatred for the cost-saving Xerography technique used for ‘101 Dalmatians’ that left animation cels with a rough, scrawly graphite-looking edge that felt almost as though everything was cobbled together from newspapers. It’s surprising then, that he went all-in on an art style so simple, so singular, so surreal and so thoroughly modern just ten years earlier. Mary Blair churned out what may as well be hundreds of visual pieces for her work on Alice in Wonderland, and her influence is so all-encompassing that it can pretty much be said to be her film entirely. Some backgrounds from the movie look as though they were lifted virtually unaltered from her original concept sketches, all of which fly completely in the face of the naturalist imagery that the movie essentially uses as a bait and switch at the beginning.
To be sure, an exaggerated art style is nothing so unique by itself. Every Disney film, even when they most faithfully translate real world elements into animation are still pushed through an impressionistic filter that accentuates certain facets of say, the leaves of a tree, the body language of a main character, the way their eyes move or the sense of depth as related through their viewpoint. Needless to say though, there is always a consistent balance that many Disney films strive for and mostly succeed at striking regardless of scope or budget. The only thing that is assuredly consistent in Wonderland is that nothing at all is consistent, and whoever portrayed Alice herself onscreen would have to face it all head-on while carrying audiences through it with her.
Even before David Hall’s first draft was being tossed around the studio, Disney conducted a test screening with 40 year old Mary Pickford for the role of Alice. Later casting guidance in 1939 mentioned 14 year old Jane Withers as inspiration: someone with an interesting voice who could “sing pleasantly, but not too professionally”. Despite their age differences, both referred actors at the time were extensively trained and highly experienced in multiple productions, some of which weren’t even film related at all. Kathryn Beaumont on the other hand, before Disney finally settled on her as Alice, had one TV appearance and three MGM movie roles to her name: most of which were so limited that she wasn’t even credited for them. By contrast, Dickie Jones was about Beaumont’s age when he became Pinnochio in 1940 after starring in more than 60 films. Early storyboard pieces for Disney’s opus had Alice dancing and twirling around alongside other characters in highly elaborate numbers, which would indicate that Beaumont wasn’t exactly one for extensive coreography. The lyrics she was given to sing either weren’t all that demanding of her vocal range or didn’t last long enough to push them to that point.
I believe the reason why Disney would choose to seek out someone with such limited experience for the leading role in a theatrical adaptation for one of the world’s most beloved works of fiction is because of what that leading role entailed. Remember that the character of Alice as portrayed in the books wasn’t a special person with something to prove. She didn’t have a profound magical connection with nature or any secret relation to someone very important in her life. She was just a little child with an active imagination: a role so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible in the eyes of the society it was created for. Heck, our own modern world is teeming with the little buggers! The events of the book could conceivably have happened to just about any living person reading about her adventures because of how typical and ordinary she seemed as a character. Such relatability would be ideal for any fantasy tale in order to help ease audiences into the fictional world (as is the case for many Disney films), but for a place like Wonderland which was written as something for the audience surrogate to actively rebel against, such a quality becomes absolutely imperative.
Kathryn Beaumont as a child actor wasn’t as experienced as others in the film industry, nor was she quite as established. To many audiences who saw her name in the opening credits under the sub-heading “and introducing”, she was exeedingly ordinary.
In other words, she was perfect.
Oh boy, that sure was “something else”, wasn’t it? Oh gawrsh-golly, jee-wizz, I just feel so subverted right now, what a “something else” moment that was.
Okay.
Now I want to talk about one more “what if something else happened” moment that I saved for last. I saved it for last, because it’s a very special “something else” moment. It is perhaps the most “something else” moment of them all.
But this moment isn’t going to be like the others. Even as it happens to fit with the traditional Disney narrative structure, it does so in a way that doesn’t really feel like it does. This is a “something ELSE something else” moment. This is not an “ooh that’s mildly fascinating kind of something else” moment. This is the pivotal lode-bearing “something else” moment. Without this “something else” moment, there would be no movie at all.
This is the “something else” moment that takes a more unexpected emotional turn and absolutely makes the movie.
Enough hype, I’m going to write about sidekicks now.
Heros had sidekicks. Villains had sidekicks. Support characters had sidekicks. Even the sidekicks have sidekicks. Sometimes the list of sidekicks to a single character is so large that it basically becomes an army and even if they’re separated for whatever reason, they will still be reunited at some point during the final act to back somebody up, whether in person or in spirit. Basically, every Disney movie lead needs to have at least one sidekick, right?
Alice has Dinah the cat…for less than two minutes.
There’s just enough time before Alice falls down the rabbit hole to indicate that Dinah might be about to join in on the adventure, what with the way she brings Alice’s attention to the Wite Rabbit and follows closely at her side as they pursue him. At least one earlier version of the movie did have Dinah tag along (sort of) and “become” the Cheshire Cat to serve as Alice’s devious trickster guide for the rest of the movie.
Disney stressed during this film’s development how important it was for Alice to have someone to interact with in order for her to believably vocalise her feelings without the internal monologues of the books seeming unnatural or annoying when spoken out loud. This is why the Doorknob was willed into existence for the beginning of the movie and before him, it was planned to be a sentient bottle of magic size-altering drink who would also pop up repeatedly to help Alice out of a particular pickle.
Neither of those things ended up happening in the final film though. As soon as Alice falls, Dinah is out of sight and out of mind. Everyone she meets comes off as inherently antagonistic, even if they themselves do not realise it. Her ill-defined goal never sees any sense of structure or planning because she never has anyone to meaningfully confide in long enough for it to matter. Even if Alice is pulled out of a rut by the Cheshire Cat, he very quickly pushes her into a greater and more immediate problem later by framing her for pranks pulled on the Queen of Hearts. By the end of the film, she’s racing to escape from Wonderland, actively pursued or impeded by almost every single character she’s ever crossed paths with until now, the entire fabric of reality crumbling before her like a level escape sequence from Wario Land 4.
Consider that this is coming from a studio known for burying their lead cast with enough companions to break a spine. I would list off every Disney character who doesn’t have at least one sidekick accompanying them throughout most of their story, but that would leave me with one single sheet of paper with the world “Alice” written across the top of the page. For a vast majority of the film, Alice is alone. But still she goes on, never once considering how in the world she is to get out again.
That is, until it’s too late for her to undo her wish and get off the ride.
Going back one last time to the David Hall storyboard draft, Alice’s first song “In A World of my Own” did not yet exist. In its place was “Beyond the Laughing Sky”, which keen-eyed listeners may notice almost directly mirrors that of “Second Star To The Right”: the opening credits number for Disney’s Peter Pan released two years after Alice in Wonderland. “Laughing Sky” was planned to be far more traditional in its sense of melancholy and longing; much closer in line with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” from MGM’s Wizard of Oz film released in 1939. It’s just as wistful and even hauntingly evocative in places, but had it stayed in the movie instead of “World of My Own”, we would have had a much weaker film overall.
The difference with The Wizard of Oz is that Dorothy’s longing was justified by her increasingly stressful life in rural Kansas, leading her to feel more alienated by a family who she thinks doesn’t care much for her emotional needs, only to remember by the end of the film how much they really mean to eachother and that the companionship she needed was never lost. Based on what remains of David Hall’s storyboards for Disney’s early version of Wonderland, we see next to nothing of Alice’s true reason for longing. There’s no hint as to what she’s missing at the beginning and even less of an idea as to what she’s gained by the end. It wasn’t until Walt and company found the “whimsy” that their focus narrowed and they managed to fill in the missing space in Alice’s character.
“World of my Own” needs to be there instead at that point in the movie to set up Alice’s hollow and careless wish. Everything else following that song serves to nudge at Alice’s patience until she concedes and admits that she was wrong. This is all to set up her anxious and desperate blundering through the madly deceptive Tulgey Wood and throw this film’s subversive nature into sharp relief. Only now does Alice realise that she’s been on her own this whole time in an unfamiliar land willed into being by her own carefree mind that she willingly relinquished control over when she herself wished for it to be nonsense.
But the real reason she doesn’t sing “Beyond the Laughing Sky” is because she had to sing “Very Good Advice” instead.
What’s that last bit that people remember most from Disney films? It’s the part where all the kids start wailing with despair and nervously asking their parents what entropy is. It’s the part where someone’s parent dies, a companion becomes lost, a friendship ends bitterly, vital progress is completely undone, a short moment of respite is painfully and inevitably cut short. Rejection, shunning, betrayal, secrets, lies, conspiracies and dirty laundry are aired out for all to see. These moments each draw from universal experiences and Disney has churned out heavy-hitting emotional low points for so many years now that it’s practically become a science.
In the original Alice books, there’s an overhanging sense of loneliness that lingers behind the wacky nonsense, brought about by the fact that Wonderland as a distorted parody of the adult world never talks to a child at their level or try to consider them on an emotional level. It’s a perspective that directly tackles the same attitude which tells kids that they will become fully developed once they fully remember some lines of poetry without telling them what the words even mean (hence why so much of the poetry that Alice herself tries to repeat in the books emerge as backwards jibberish).
Since Disney’s version of Alice in Wonderland is directly calling Disney itself into question, that perspective has shifted. In order to wish upon a star, one has to truly, deeply mean what they say: to understand what they need, why they need it and what they need to do should the opportunity present itself. One must take advantage of everything that is given in order to make the wish come true and this includes friends: people who are waiting and ready to be leant on and to help shoulder a heavy burden, even if it’s only for the briefest moment of solidarity or to lend them a hint of strength.
Alice does not get any friends or resources to help her with her wish because it was already given to her on a silver platter. She never thought about why she needed a world of her own or how she was going to get it and so now, she has even less of an idea of how to leave it behind. A little bit of goofing around was fine at first, but she had to take it too far and all she is able to do after having tired herself out from trying to find a way is wait around for the way to come to her and feel sorry for herself as everything around her melts away into literal darkness devoid of form or presence.
Everyone at some point will have become carried away by their own lofty ambition, go against their own better judgement and not realise how far gone they are until its too late. But no other Disney film I’ve seen has ever made this a core conflict for its own main character. Not even any alternative adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that I’m familiar with seems to stress quite so abundantly how isolated a person can possibly be. “Very Good Advice” as a song doesn’t have the gut punch factor of Mulan’s secret revealed, the silent gasp of Mufasa’s assassination by Scar in The Lion King or the bittersweetness of “Baby Mine” from Dumbo. But this downer beat is instead characterised by a strange, cold and empty feeling that only gets exacerbated when this thoroughly defeated girl starts crying to herself half way through her own song without a single soul to comfort or console her.
“Very Good Advice” is sweet sugary whimsical angst. It being placed at this point in the movie is what proves beyond any doubt in my mind that Alice in Wonderland truly is the most subversive animated Disney movie.
Is it any wonder then why audiences of the 1950s bounced so hard off of Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland? Is it any mystery why they bemoaned this film’s lack of heart while praising Cinderella and Peter Pan to the high heavens, both of which released close enough to be considered pallete cleansers? Does it come as any surprise that Disney would try to downplay the films more off-brand qualities in spin off projects, tie-in merchandise and eye-rollingly saccharine comics? Not since ‘Runaway Brain’ has Disney been so afraid of their own creation. They set out to take the great projenitor of nonsense fantasy literature and translate its wild and idiosyncratic contradictory nature to big screen animation.
Guess what? They succeeded.
Even those who don’t hate the Disney version would hardly argue that it’s the most accurate, but I absolutely would. Disney’s movie ended on a message of “don’t get too carried away with yourself” which may not exactly match up with Lewis Carroll’s “keep asking questions of the establishment” from the original text, but the ‘Americanised’ Disney animation very clearly still carries the same lively anarchic spirit that helped the original books gain their touchstone status, whether Disney likes it or not. Not only did Walt successfully manage to find the whimsy he was so desparately seeking, but this success is also evident throughout the film and the way it’s presented, even if it took more than a decade for someone like me to lay a finger on his intentions.
Of all the languages that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated to over the years, ‘Film’ has proved to be the most challenging of all to get right. Fans of the books like to discuss to this day which version got it the “most” right. In this case however, the language wasn’t necessarily “film” or even ‘animation’: it was ‘Walt Disney’. Many other stories and legends were translated to ‘Walt Disney’ before and many more continue to be translated today. But even with multiple changes, elaborations and sanitisations, those classic tales were already a pretty comfortable fit for the language of Disney.
So what if something else happened instead?
D’UH END.
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