despite the fact i love the story of alex wonderland and i love the 1951 animation
when i was growing up i hadn't actually seen it in a really long time so i decided to give
it another watch the first time i've seen it as an adult and i could remember quite a lot
of it i could remember obviously the iconic scenes the croquet the painting the roses red
the on birthday party but there were a lot of aspects of this that i couldn't remember and
i have to say it's one of the most imaginative and child-like films disney has ever created and
if you haven't seen it in a long time i definitely recommend you watch it through an adult's lens
because i think you'll have a lot of fun with it so as i said this was released in 1951
directed by three disney greats clyde geronimo wilford jackson and hamilton lucky
and the voice cast is brilliant catherine beaumont voices alice herself and
the actual how alice goes down the rabbit hole um there will be spoilers here i'm going to spoil the
narrative because i'm going to talk about certain things but i'm assuming you're familiar with the
story so when alice goes down the rabbit hole it's quite clear that she has been dreaming even
straight away it's quite clear that she's dreaming i prefer it with later films and i can't remember
how it happens in the book um i don't know if i've ever actually read the book all the way through
but i like it when it's not really actually that when we don't think it's a dream but we just think
it's the new reality but when she goes down the rabbit hole obviously she has the whole eat me
drink me thing which i always think is a really dodgy thing in this story because young children
watching that would quite easily pick up anything that says eat me and drink me and consume it
and that's the only problem i have even with even with tim burton tim burton is my hero
i love him more than life but even with his version of it i think maybe i mean it
needs to be a more obvious message with that aspect of it and the fact that you shouldn't
just eat anything that says eat me but after that the rest of the film is pretty safe and
obviously i'm not going to go scene by scene explaining the narrative but what i will say is
we meet a lot of characters in this who don't ever really appear in later interpretations
i am referring um to the dodo we do occasionally meet the dodo on other versions
um but there's a whole sequence in this just before we meet the caterpillar
that's quite unique to this film and obviously the original narrative and i don't know why other
adaptations don't focus on those aspects but maybe because i didn't have that emotional connection
i just didn't find it all that interesting those certain aspects of it but once once to feel dumb
and tweedledee stopped reciting the walrus in the carpenter and we got to the caterpillar and
then we met the mad hair and that hair the march hair and the mad hatter and then of course the
queen of hearts everything was recognizable it was beautiful it sparked memories i love the animation
design of the queen of hearts she is not one of my favorite disney villains um helena bottom carter
of course her erasabith queen of hearts is one of my favorite disney villains but this animation one
isn't but i love the design of her and the same with the mad hatter the green outfit looks perfect
in fact the animation here there's something about the animation of all of the characters
that just looks disturbing almost apart from the white rabbit i'd say the white rabbit looks
like what a white rabbit in a waistcoat with a pocket watch would look like the rest of them you
kind of have to take a step back and think is that what i would have drawn that creature to look like
if somebody said draw draw in our chair draw two twins usually these are not what we would
draw so i think it's very creative very imaginative kind of looks like the original
illustrations to a reasonable degree certainly they're very recognizable with regards to the
soundtrack i could only remember painting the roses red and having watched it now that is still
the only song that kind of sticks in my head um obviously the own birthday song as well
but i do love painting the roses red and i think the red queen as the narrative progresses makes
this um just all the more exciting for me there is a bit of kind of intensity i didn't know how
alice was going to leave wonderland but did they ever mention the name that it was wonderland i'm
sure they did i can't remember it but i'm sure at some point they would have referred to wonderland
but i didn't know how she was going to get out of wonderland i wasn't sure what would happen or how
this narrative would conclude itself compared to other versions so i thought it was quite exciting
what makes it there are two things i love in this one is the fact that it just completely
lets go of all common sense and just throws the towel in and says let's let's just make
this as mental as we can and as mad and crazy and fun as we can and it does that very well but
there's also one line in this and i don't know if this is directly from the book or if it was
written into the film but alice says something along the lines of stop with this nonsense
and a lot of nonsense happens after that but it really shows that you may want to live in a
world of nonsense as alice did where there are no rules and you don't have to do your history lesson
but sometimes you need order you need sense you need logic and routine
if you just have this level of nonsense you start to lose your mind a little bit it's obviously a
lot of fun i think it takes lewis carroll's story and makes an absolutely fantastic version of it
it's not my favorite there there's another version with a car member who is who else is in it
but the tweedles are played by george wendt and robbie coltrane and that's a really
brilliant version obviously tim burton's version is always going to be my favorite
but if you haven't seen this well if you've never seen this i absolutely recommend it
but if you haven't seen it in a long time since you were a child
definitely give it a watch give it a walk through an adult's lens i think you'll find it to be quite
a different experience to what it was when you're a child but certainly i'm glad i've rewatched it
it's disturbing in some ways but ultimately a lot of fun