Alice in Wonderland
Short description
Alice in Wonderland follows a curious young girl who chases a white rabbit down its hole and finds herself in a strange world where the usual rules do not apply. There she meets a cast of peculiar characters, among them the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar and the Queen of Hearts. The world keeps shifting around her, and she must make her way through it if she is to return home. The story draws on Lewis Carroll's books about the same character.
The film was directed by Hamilton Luske, Wilfred Jackson and Clyde Geronimi, the same team behind Cinderella. Each director worked on a substantial run of animated features: for Luske this was the twelfth of fifteen, for Jackson the fourteenth of seventeen, and for Geronimi the eleventh of fifteen, with Peter Pan following for all three. Walt Disney produced. The voice cast includes Kathryn Beaumont as Alice, Ed Wynn, Richard Haydn, Sterling Holloway, Jerry Colonna and Verna Felton, with 26 credited cast members and 60 credited crew.
Made by Walt Disney Productions on a budget of 3 million dollars, the film took about 57 million dollars worldwide, a strong return on its cost. On IMDb it holds 7.3 out of 10 from 166,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.2 from 6,393 votes, while a critics' rating stands at 7 out of 10 from 77 reviews, putting critics and audiences close together. It runs 75 minutes.
What's left behind the scenes
- The cartoon is based on Lewis Carroll’s tale “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (1865).
- This film was the first Disney animated feature to display the last names of the voice actors alongside the characters’ names on screen.
- The project was in development for 10 years, and its production took another 5 years.
- The dummy was modeled after the actor who voiced him, Ed Wynn.
- In the scene with the Walrus and the Carpenter, the letter 'R' flashes in the word “March” on the oyster mother’s calendar. This is a reference to an old saying about only eating oysters in months containing the letter 'R'. This saying originates from the fact that in England, the months without the letter 'R' (May, June, July, August) coincide with the hot season, when freshly caught oysters wouldn't last long without refrigeration.
- During the filming of the mad tea party scenes, Ed Wynn spontaneously came up with the lines that the Mad Hatter delivers while trying to "fix" the White Rabbit's pocket watch. Walt Disney himself observed the filming and instructed the animators to include the lines in the film. They initially objected, citing extraneous noises in the recording, but Disney simply told them that wasn't his problem and left. The sound engineers had a difficult time, but they were able to re-record Wynn's lines and remove all extraneous noises as instructed.
- Kathryn Beaumont voiced Alice and served as a model for the character for the studio animators. Scenes with Beaumont were filmed in the studio pavilions, and Beaumont was dressed in Alice's dress. For the scene in which the oversized Alice gets stuck in the White Rabbit's house, stagehands constructed a model of the house and placed Beaumont inside it. According to animator Eric Larson, to properly animate Alice's body, they needed to see how it moved while inside the house, so the model had to be disassembled and then reassembled with transparent walls, allowing them to observe Beaumont's body.
- Originally, the cartoon was intended to be made in the 1930s. Storyboards were created by the talented British artist David Hall. The script was even closer to the original plot than Disney's final version, but this version was rejected as being too frightening. In particular, it included a scene in which the Mad Hatter and the March Hare chase Alice with a knife and scissors, the Cheshire Cat had numerous razor-sharp teeth, and Alice nearly lost her head.
- In late 1945, English prose writer, science fiction author, novelist, and philosopher Aldous Huxley worked with Walt Disney on early script drafts. Huxley's mother, Julia Arnold, was once one of the girls whom the author of 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' photographed and to whom he told stories about Alice. Disney found all of Huxley's ideas too intellectual and refused to use them, and didn't even mention Huxley in the film's credits.
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