Cory Massimino

Review: Alice in Wonderland (1951)

November 5, 2020 by Cory

★★★★★

While this “Disney-fication” of a classic work of English literature is maligned by some, I find it inexhaustibly entertaining in its wit, charm, and craft. To Carroll’s carnival of language, Disney adds a carnival of sight and sound. What results is a carnival for the imagination; a whirling dream of delightfully bizarre images, sounds, and characters. You can’t help but marvel at so many of its gorgeous shots and hum along to so many of its catchy tunes. It’s irresistible in its childlike amusement and love of life’s inexplicable delights. The film always has me totally enchanted from start to finish.

“Alice in Wonderland” is fundamentally a fable; one which both celebrates the wonders of the imagination and warns of its excesses. But upon its release it was something of a victim of its own themes. When everyone is mad, no one is mad. When nothing makes sense, everything makes sense. When every day is a birthday, no day is a birthday. When every frame is bursting with imagination, none of the frames are bursting with imagination. But I tend to consider this a kind of boring, cynical interpretation. You can never have too much creativity. There is no such thing as an overabundance of imagination. And saying so makes you sound like Alice’s snooty teacher.

I do think there is something deeper to this movie’s initially poor reception and even semi-disavowal by Walt Disney himself. Not only did “Alice in Wonderland” push the boundaries of the imagination when it comes to images and sounds, it pushed the boundaries of conventional cinematic form. Specifically, the conventional structure of Disney movies, movies for kids, and movies with women protagonists.

“Alice in Wonderland” features nothing resembling a conventional antagonist or villain. The closest you get is the Queen of Hearts, but she’s only introduced with about 20 minutes left in the runtime. Just look at the movie poster to see the centrality (or lack thereof) of the Queen of Hearts. This was a total deviation from the usual animated screenplays that prominently featured very clear antagonists that are introduced early on, a trend that is *still* rarely bucked, if ever. The closest Disney has come to this is in Moana.

There is also not the teensiest bit of romance in “Alice in Wonderland.” This must’ve been the strangest part of a movie starring a women in 1951. Especially a movie from the studio known for princesses. I suspect this is part of why Alice is often an afterthought for Disney and doesn’t tend to be placed into the major category of historical Disney women protagonists. Again, this is a trend that’s even hard to buck today, with Lilo & Stitch, Moana, and (sort of) Frozen being the only instances.

In many ways, “Alice in Wonderland” is creatively indebted to The Wizard of Oz, using dreams to explore the escapist impulse that emerges from adolescent angst, breaking every rule of logic to give life to that underlying longing to cross every border and transgress every boundary constraining us as we come of age, form our identities, and find our place in the world.

Without a conventional villain or love interest, Alice’s conflict is thus entirely internal. She is given exactly what she said she wanted in her early version of the classic Disney “I Want” song: a wonderland in which up is down, left is right, and sense is nonsense. She thought the grass was greener on the other side and now that she is feeling and smelling this new grass, she’s not sure she was right.

Alice is initially delighted and amused by new surroundings, new creatures, and a totally new world in which everything seems designed to invoke wonder in her. But the instinctive curiosity that led her to wonderland eventually becomes exhausted by the endless nonsense she can’t seem to keep up with or follow. She moves from scenario to scenario and creature to creature desperately looking for the White Rabbit but merely gets caught up in new and weirder nonsense each time because of her insatiable curiosity.

First, the snobby Doorknob welcomes Alice to Wonderland with some snide callousness, then Governor Dodo dumbfounds her with his impossible means of drying off from the ocean, then the Tweedle Twins annoy her with their inane, if insightful, fables, then Bill the Lizard with a Ladder tries to smoke her out, then the Flowers bully her, then the Caterpillar condescends to her, then the Songbird insults her, then the Cheshire Cat creeps her out, then the Mad Hatter and March Hare confuse her. And finally she decides that she’s had enough “nonsense” and wants to return home. Despite her longing for such a wondrous land, when she actually spends some time here, she becomes something of an outsider.

What follows is a sequence equal parts charming and chilling. Alice wanders around wonderland, no longer in search of the White Rabbit but utterly defeated. She encounters impossible creature after impossible creature; birds, dogs, frogs, ducks, and more all strangely entwined with everyday mundane objects and tools like mirrors, glasses, umbrellas, brooms, various instruments, and more. Many of these creatures are downright cute and par for the course for little Disney animals, but — and this feature becomes more and more glaring as we encounter nothing but these creatures and see Alice continually put off and scared by all these things she simply doesn’t understand — they are also something like Frankensteinian horrors; unthinkable and unnatural amalgamations that on the one hand further push the boundaries of the imagination, but on the other, illuminate the dark side of an unbounded imagination.

This is delightfully illustrated when Alice finally stumbles on a path in the dark forest, only for it be another dead end because what can only be described as a cute broom-dog has been sweeping it up. Even a simple path home is not available to Alice here. Wonderland has no tolerance for sense, for reason, for certainty, for direction, for goals. There’s a reason the Mad Hatter and March Hare made sure to specify to Alice she “start at the beginning” and “stop” at the end of her story, because that kind of linear, sensible, storytelling is simply not normal for this place.

At this point, the only object in Wonderland to really contain a kind of internal logic and resemble its ordinary world counterpart is the pocket watch of the White Rabbit, who is a sort of bridge between the real world and wonderland; the only link Alice really had left to her world. So this watch carries not only the symbolism of being *of” Alice’s world, it also carries with it the ordinary symbolism carried by watches, which are often associated with a sense of structure and order. Moreover, the structure and order associated with watches and time is completely alien to dreams, which are the only phenomenon we experience that really doesn’t follow the rules of time, hence clocks so often being juxtaposed to dreaming.

After the Mad Hatter destroys the White Rabbit’s pocket watch, Alice leaves. This is when she decides she has had enough “nonsense” and gets lost in the forest. This is her lowest point. All her surroundings slowly disappear and she becomes enveloped in a pitch black frame. She faces something of an existential crisis, lamenting all the “very good advice” she gives herself but never follows. This external alienation from her environment has slowly led to an internal alienation from her self. The Caterpillar repeatedly asked her who she was and she really didn’t know. While superficially an outward journey, Alice’s trip through wonderland is ultimately an internal journey. She is looking for a sense of order within herself.

It’s at this point that the Cheshire Cat reappears and gives Alice a brand new goal: ask the Queen how to get home. This is Alice’s final “test” because in the Queen she finds something of a foil; a distorted mirror image of Alice if she stays in wonderland her whole life and, contra the Caterpillar’s sage advice, inevitably lets her “temper” get the best of her, leading her to tyrannically micromanage every little detail of wonderland to conform to her “ways” i.e. make sense. This is why the White Rabbit that Alice spent the whole movie chasing works for the Queen and why the Queen is dressed in red and black, inverting Alice’s blue and white. It’s also why the Queen is so obsessed with painting roses red (their “proper” color) and why her minions are playing cards, symbols of perfect mathematical order and structure.

Notably, the most spoken line in the film (behind “naturally” and “curiouser and curiouser”) is “off with her head” because, I think, the head is a common symbol for the brain, the mind, and reason. These are, of course, things that cannot be tolerated in wonderland. As the Cheshire Cat says, everyone here is “mad,” meaning everyone has lost their heads, and in the Queen we see that here “mad” can refer to both insanity *and* anger. Consider the Queen’s obsession with beheading anyone who slightly upsets her order in light of her association with hearts, which are the source of our emotions and often juxtaposed to heads. Not only that, the redness of these hearts (and of the roses) mirrors the anger that defines the Queen’s personality.

The prime targets of “Alice in Wonderland” are the sensible and orderly. So of course it climaxes in a court room scene. Courts are the places most associated with order, with justice, with the use of reason to settle disputes against the backdrop of a reality in which objective truth is attainable. Wonderland’s courts don’t exactly work that way. Witnesses are brought in who weren’t remotely near the events in question and sentences are determined before verdicts. Here lies the ultimate inversion of the orderly justice that presupposes something beyond mere subjective imagination.

Now Alice confronts the very worst of her wonderland. When unreason and illogic are weaponized against *her* by the people with power, her only weapons are the reason and logic she thought so useless. She is forced to rely on them to defend herself in court against absurd accusations. But at the mercy of the Queen and desperate for escape, Alice’s pleas for reason and logic go unheard. She finally decides she has no choice but to play by the rules of wonderland and use the mushrooms from earlier to become giant.

But even “abiding by the rules of your enemy” is incoherent in a world where nothing abides by rules! Alice returns to normal size and the court room totally erupts thanks to the antics of the Cheshire Cat, who almost functions as a kind of magical manifestation of Alice’s subconscious Id, nudging her to her ultimate fate and sowing the chaos which turns Alice’s dream into a full on nightmare. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Alice’s pet in the real world is also a cat.

At some point, any semblance of geographical sense and spacial logic dissipates. Characters and settings collapse in on each other. Shots continually cascade with no sense of order, unfolding according to nothing but the visual rhythm of increasingly abstract and incoherent shapes and colors. Wonderland has reached the height of unreason. Everyone Alice met comes back to haunt her like Frankenstein’s mob. She has become the ultimate outsider, transgressing against a world defined by transgression.

It’s only in returning to from where she came that Alice can escape this nightmare. She arrives back at the doorknob that introduced her to wonderland and literally finds herself by looking through the keyhole and then screaming her own name until she wakes up. Interestingly, Alice wakes up on the *other side* of the bridge in the gorgeous tracking shot that opened the film (and which foreshadowed all the movie’s major symbols: clocks, birds, flowers, and water).

This can be read as something akin to the open-ended ending of Inception in which we’re not sure if what we’re seeing is the real world or the dream world. But we’re also given no indication to when and where Alice was when she actually fell asleep. Perhaps the opening shots of the movie are dreamt as well! This is a subtle but genius detail that gives an even further feeling of unreality to the story. More interestingly, the closing shot creates a beautiful (and orderly!) symmetry to a movie otherwise totally lacking in conventional narrative structure by showing us the same symbolic images from the beginning of the film but from a totally new perspective.

Thus, Alice has returned to the real world but she’s also gained new perspective on that world thanks to her experiences in wonderland that showed her the limits of unreason, of escapist fantasies. While she desperately needed the initial escape that wonderland provided, she couldn’t stay there forever. While humans need dreams we also need reality. Alice had to be reminded of the value of the latter. And like her, when the movie ends we too must step away from our escapist fantasy and return to our real lives.

More than most “Alice in Wonderland” is a movie in which the viewer is placed in the shoes of the protagonist, sharing their longings for unbridled imagination but, eventually, for concrete existence too; for escape from the escape. After all, if everything is a dream, nothing is. There’s got to be something to *escape from* otherwise there is no such thing as escape.

I think this dialectical attitude towards the relationship between fantasy and reality in human life is why “Alice in Wonderland” sometimes employs downright odd symmetrical imagery, such as the shots of hilariously distinct, sharp lines clearly delineating sandy beach from grassy forest, night from day, and sea from air. While the real world would never come close to embodying such precise order, wonderland is ironically filled with it but only when it makes for images symmetrically divided by (semi) opposites. But, like fantasy and reality, these dichotomies (beach/forest, night/day, sea/air) are partly defined by each other; they cannot exist except for the existence of the other; they all presuppose their negation, although perhaps not always as clearly as in the distinction between birthdays and unbirthdays!

These symmetrical images also bring to mind the way the movie plays with transgression and boundary-crossing. Alice crosses the threshold between logic and illogic, between reality and fantasy. But it’s not just conceptual boundaries of logic (both mental and spacial). She also transgresses the emergent boundaries of social living. She is a fish out of water in wonderland, unaccustomed to its norms — or more accurately lack thereof, since she is not just some outsider inhabiting a new culture but someone from a world that operates according to logic inhabiting a world that doesn’t. Alice spends much of the movie simply questioning the behavior of others that she doesn’t understand and/or being shamed for violating apparent rules, especially during the tea party, an event heavily associated with strict manners and precise order.

This all escalates in the final sequence in which Alice is subject not just to irrationality and not just to silly rules but one of the very worst, most brutal expressions of silly, irrational rule-making in human history: monarchical tyranny. The Queen also plays the role of the ultimate authority figure for Alice’s coming-of-age arc. Alice tries her best to abide by the “Queen’s ways” but it’s simply impossible. This intolerable manifestation of unreason was the last straw for Alice before she finally managed to wake herself up to reality.

Despite its initial failure, “Alice in Wonderland” was revived in the 1970s with Jefferson Airplane’s hit song “White Rabbit.” In the age of drugs and free love, audiences were better positioned to appreciate the movie’s trippy visuals, lack of romance, and themes of mind-opening transgression.

“Alice in Wonderland” is, perhaps ironically, still mostly an odd cousin out in the pantheon of Disney animation and so sadly often forgotten. Without any real structure or antagonist, it just meanders along, chronicling strange encounter after strange encounter. It has a female protagonist, but she’s not a princess and there is no male hero to save her. Instead, hers is a journey of self-discovery and self-knowledge. Is Alice’s dreamworld meant to show the limits of logic or satirize those who would be illogical? Does this movie’s lovely indulgences contradict its message? Maybe all of the above!

But I really have no idea. The film is filled with riddle after riddle. Alice’s primary emotion is befuddlement. I see no reason to expect anything different as a viewer. Wonderland is a place merely to wonder about the possibilities. Nothing more, nothing less. Trying to subject a place where nothing is impossible to the constraints of logical analysis is, well… impossible.

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