Walt Disney and Alice in Wonderland - A Brief History

[Ernest Rister]

What follows is the brief article I wrote for IGN.com as a preface for their upcoming review of ALICE IN WONDERLAND: 2-Disc. I understand my full text is going to be cut down, so here is the full version. Enjoy:

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Walt Disney's ALICE IN WONDERLAND: A Brief History

For American Animation buffs, it is no surprise that Walt Disney would one day make an animated feature based on Alice in Wonderland. The real surprise is that it took so long.

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 twenty-two 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, and it featured a live-action girl (Virginia Davis) in an all-animated world, interacting with cartoon characters. While charming, the short failed to receive much notice, and so Walt Disney made the hard decision to abandon producing animated films, and he left Kansas City to become a live-action film director in Hollywood.

After months of trying to find work in live-action, and failing, Walt 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, and 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).

And so, 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 while many credit the invention of Mickey Mouse as the first great Disney success, without the Alice Comedies, it is doubtful that there ever would have been a "Steamboat Willie" in the first place.

Much has been written about Disney's longtime affection for Mickey Mouse, but what many do not know is that Walt Disney also had a long-standing affection for Alice in Wonderland. 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, Walt Disney planned on making Alice in Wonderland his first feature-length film, not Snow White. 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 a live-action version of Alice in Wonderland in 1933, with a script by Citizen Kane scribe Joseph Mankiewicz and an all-star cast that included Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, 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, Fantasia, and Bambi 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 Three Caballeros. This, too, fell through, and in 1946, work finally began work 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 in Wonderland that would star Luanna Patten (seen in Disney's Song of the South and So Dear to my Heart).

In the late 40's, 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 Bambi and The Three Caballeros in that Walt 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. Indeed, Lewis Carroll's Alice books have no real plot to speak of, and because of the literary complexity of Carroll's work, they are essentially unfilmmable. 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 bold 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 films 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, and many of them found a way into the film, if only for a few brief moments. "I'm Late" remains one of the more famous Disney songs, and yet the entire number is less than a minute long. 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", "A, E, I, O, U", "We'll Smoke the Monster Out", "Twas Brillig", "The Caucus Race", and others), this fact is frequently overlooked.

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.

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. 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, Disney's Alice in Wonderland aired as the 2nd episode of Walt Disney's "Disneyland" TV series on ABC in 1954).
Walt surmised that the film failed because Alice lacked "heart" and was a difficult character for audiences to get behind and root for. In The Disney Films, Leonard Maltin relates how Disney 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."

Almost two decades later, after Walt Disney's death and the North American success of George Duning's animated feature Yellow Submarine in the late 60's, 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). 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.




This re-release was successful enough to warrant a subsequent re-release a few years later, where it played on a double feature with the live-action Disney film, Amy.

Still, Alice in Wonderland was never a blockbuster on the order of the other established Disney animated classics, and so, with the advent of the home video market in the early 80's, the Disney company chose to make Alice in Wonderland one of the first titles available for the rental market on Beta, VHS, and Videodisc, and the film has been a home video staple ever since.

While it has not been critically re-evaluated as a visionary "ahead-of-its-time" masterwork on the order of a Fantasia, the reputation of Alice has improved substantially over the last thirty years. Modern appreciation for the film stems from the overall growth in the appreciation of animation in general, and respect for the film's imaginative visuals have come to somewhat outweigh the criticisms over the film's episodic storyline.

Disney's Alice in Wonderland will probably never rank among the most popular of the Disney animated features, but no longer is it seen as a failure, either. As the tradition of hand-drawn Disney animated features draws to a close in the wake of the CGI era, Alice in Wonderland will remain a film that fans of animation will deservedly admire for many years to come.

-- Ernest Rister, 1/9/04

[Uncle Remus]

very nice article. it would have been cool if Disney made the film to be live action and animated.

[Disneykid]

That's an excellent and informative article. Too bad it's going to be edited down, but at least we got to read the full version. Any idea when IGN is posting their Alice review?

[Ernest Rister]

Sometime this week, and I'd suspect earlier than later.

I don't know why Walt never pulled the trigger and went with his instincts, i.e., making the film a combination of live-action and animation. I think it would have received more attention, especially after the success of Song of the South. So Dear to my Heart was not particularly well-received, and Three Caballeros barely broke even, so that may have had something to do with it. Still, one look at Remus fishing with Brer Frog and lighting his pipe in Song of the South, and you get a sense of what might have been with an animated Alice.

[Disneykid]

Yes, I've always thought the idea of a live action Alice in an animated Wonderland was brilliant because visually you're making Alice stand out even more than, say, in the Carroll novel. In today's world, an ideal version of Alice (to me, anyway) would be to have a live action girl play Alice and have Wonderland be made up of various animation styles to make it feel more disjointed. For example, have the Caterpillar be stop motion animation, the Mad Tea Party cell animation, the Queen and the playing cards CGI, etc. I think it'd make for a fascinating visual experience.

[Joe Carioca]

Really enjoyed your article Ernest Rister!
Can't wait for the reviews of the DVD!!

[Ursula102]

I actually loved Alice In Wonderland, but like you stated in your article it will never be considered one of the most popular of the many Disney movies out there. But still, i think the idea of Disney putting Alice In Wonderland on a Masterpiece Edition DVD is what they should've been done a long time ago. Because Alice is a masterpiece, whether it is exactly like the books or not, and I will definitely buy it to have in my collection. And I like that theory of yours Disneykid, I can actually see that happening in the near future of a new version of Alice. And it would be really cool to watch something with so many different types of animation like you said.