Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Alice in Wonderland is, as well as what the one-line summary suggests, is one of the more abstracted kind of animated films the Disney studio has ever released. And it needs this edge for what the material requires. Here is a film that means different times throughout a life, for some people. As a kid it's a wondrous, madcap adventure with as much sincerity and polite little moments with Alice as it contains vision after vision where varied forms of caricatured anarchy and odd transformations in the guise of fables.

As an older teen, it comes off more as seeming like a 'drug' movie, and of course Carroll's original story has become not just a phrase for 'through the looking glass' in society, but as part of metaphors for the drug community ("White Rabbit" is one of those classic, strange 60's songs that still works today). For what Carrol intended when he wrote the book - for his child friend named Alice - it's taken on other, surrealistic connotations over the centuries. With various allusions to such substances like the big-and-small pills, the caterpillar with the pipe, the hare and hatter with their 'tea', and the Cheshire Cat going in through the out door, it's not too hard to picture it as being a precursor to the 60s.

But, of course, there is also that very innocent approach that the Disney films had of that early period. Alice is as innocent and day-dreaming as Snow White, though with a little more interest due to her having to be a formidable enough guide through this imaginative world. And there are little, surreal fables that are laced in that, again, capture the absurd poetic tone of Carroll's work. The segment with the Walrus and the Carpenter is a very good example of this, and is one of the funniest segments not only of the film but maybe of any Disney feature of the period. And stretching out after going into taking the ideas and images from the book into animated form, the abstractions become rather incredible for their time.

As a kid as well as now I loved seeing the large Alice start to cry to the point of creating a dangerous sea of it right by the snobbish doorknob. The Cheshire Cat is one of those insane concoctions that is delightful in its unhinged abandon. The Queen of Hearts sequences towards the end are, for me, the only ones that are more closer to the 'traditional' Disney films where the looser, crazier nature that went on before with the March Hare and Mad Hatter took place (one of my all-time favorite Disney scenes by the way- that little mouse deserved some sort of prize).

Overall, this is quite a treat to revisit years later- yes, even in a non-induced kind of state- with cheerful songs, and a neat balance of delirious humor and silly imagination. In short, a film like this probably couldn't be made today, at least by Disney.

Fmovies: Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland is in a category all of its own. Disney's spectacular vision and range is showcased in his 13th animated feature. With a little help from the Lewis Carroll series for which it was adapted from, this film's surrealism makes for a completely unique entry in the Disney pantheon. It's like the black sheep. To this day, they haven't made another one like it.

The story isn't one in the linear sense, but more of a compendium of unrelated series of events. But they all lead to a common goal.

Alice, herself, has some radical ideals when it comes to the world around her, and faces hostility from the adults in her life. But she learns her imagination is mild in comparison to the oddities of Wonderland. She ventures off to this magical world, only to discover she isn't very welcome. She has a terrible time and no one wants her to be there. And at moments, she finds herself questioning the silliness of the realm, appropriating her mindset to that of her closed-minded mother back home.

The depth of Alice is deeper than most realize. It's subtle, but her attitude is brilliant commentary on contrasting our own independent philosophies with those that we're raised on.

Surprisingly, the film is not as dated as you would think. Some of the humor holds up well compared to today's standards.

Considering the very short runtime, the songs are in abundance and create a high ratio to the non-singing scenes. And naturally, there are one or two weaker tunes, but most of them are ear-worm classics.

At 75 minutes, we spend enough time in Wonderland to warrant a complete story. Or collection of events. Alice in Wonderland is meant to be episodic. And it's very dark and deranged at times, too. While many people find that those things make the movie harder to warm up to, it's actually part of what makes it one of my favorite Disney films from the Walt era. An underrated piece of cinema.

Twizard Rating: 95

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Most films age over time. In 20 years will Titanic still be as amazing as it was in 1998? Will Jurassic Park still have people gawping open mouthed at the cinema screen? I think not. Its a rarity, but sometimes, just sometimes, there comes a movie that is timeless, magical and eternal, one such film is Alice in Wonderland.

It seems to me, when watching most Disney films, that Walt Disney had an evil masterplan to mess with the minds of children, young and old. Dumbo is a film about an outsider, Pinocchio is a film about a freak child who cannot stop lying. Walt only made these films family viewing through constantly having a moral ending. Dumbo can fly and Pinocchio is rewarded for risking his life to save another, however, these moral endings do not disguise the fact that, at times, Disney films were quite peculiar.

Alice in Wonderland on the surface is a dreamlike fantasy about a child nodding off and visiting a wonderful wonderland where flowers sing, caterpillars smoke and rabbits talk. However, similarly to Blue Velvet, this film is not about the surface values, its is about the dark, seedy undertones that exist beneath the aesthetic surface.

Below its surface lies a wealth of wholly unlikeable and unhelpful creatures. Aside from the King (Hooray) of Hearts, each character only serves to hinder Alice in her attempts to come to terms with her warped dream. The Cheshire Cat is responsible for putting Alice in court, the White Rabbit wants to have Alice destroyed when he finds her at his home, the flowers shun Alice when they incorrectly perceive her to be a common garden weed, the Mad Hatter and the March Hare also shun Alice for no reason whatsoever, this list is as long as the tunnel that leads Alice into her Wonderland.

To look back at the film nowadays, one could surmount that the ending is nothing more than a cop-out (these thoughts were true for Lynch's Boxing Helena). She dreamt it all along is nothing more than saying, here, we'll give you licence to create a magical world, no boundaries because it all exists inside a young girls mind.

I'll admit this review might seem overly critical of the film, but it is for these warped reasons and the context of what the film represents or least what it should represent that I absolutely adore it. Walt Disney might have had a masterplan to screw with the minds of his children, but I say, good luck to him. A subtle undertone to the magical shell of the movie shows that the yolk is in fact sour. I daren't but will compare this movie to Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder, another film about a false surface level and the warped undertones of life and death.

Sleep is only a state of mind, it's what happens in this state of mind that really matters. Or at least, what mattered to Walt.

Classic.

Alice in Wonderland fmovies. I have always liked this film, being a true blue Disney fan I consider it on of the great ones. I like the animation from the fifties. I have read the books and they frightened me more than this film, I know some of the reviewers feel the opposite. I feel that the Disney artists had a touch of what Wonderland is like and just had fun with this one. It is true there is no great feats here but when I have had a stressful day I like to put the brain in neutral and just enjoy the dazzling colors. The silliness is great and the cast brilliant. Alice was one of Mr. Disney's least favorite characters, he thought she was too cold. But when you are surrounded by a bunch of loonies that don't care for you I think you might be cold too. On a scale of 1 to 10 I would rate this an 8.

Among all the Disney cartoons I have seen (and I think I've probably seen them all, until "Taram...", in 1983), "Alice in Wonderland" remains my favorite one. Of course, it has a lot of differences, comparing to the wonderful book from Lewis Carroll, but Walt Disney managed to give a strange object, without a real classical story (with a starting and an ending), which gives this film a funny "experimental side"... And I particularly love the beautiful colors in this film. It simply makes you want to follow Alice, who follows herself the White Rabbit, in the wonderland. Maybe "Alice in Wonderland" is more an "adult cartoon".

For material that does not lend itself very easily to cinema, this is a pretty good adaptation of "Alice in Wonderland" with some enjoyable characters and sequences. It succeeds, at least in a basic way, in capturing part of the manic but imaginative nature of Lewis Carroll's story.

Much of the language, poetry, and ideas that make the original story so captivating cannot really be conveyed very easily in a movie, and so it would be nearly impossible for any cinema version of Alice to be completely satisfying to those who love the book. Instead, this version simply tries to make the characters come to life, and to use the animation to recreate the feel, if not the depth, of Alice's experience.

The animation drives most of the movie, and at times it is pretty imaginative. Some of the voices work very well, too, with the likes of Ed Wynn and Sterling Holloway fitting the animated characters quite well.

Carroll's stories are so enchanting and creative that it is no surprise that there have been so many efforts through the years to capture the magic of the Alice stories on film. None of the cinema versions has yet come close to matching the books, yet the material itself has made most of them worth watching. In this one, the overall production has a definite Disney style to it, which makes it different from the original, but as a movie it works pretty well.