Alice In Wonderland: The Movie

In 1920 Walt Disney had his first success with “shorts’ about a real girl named Alice in an animated world. It was then that he decided he wanted to make a film based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland. But it wasn’t until 1946 that Disney finally could start to fulfill this dream. The film took five years to make. Because of the financial success of “Cinderella” in 1950, he was able to get the top talent of his day for the voices. Also, “Alice In Wonderland” had the largest musical score of all of his classics.

Disney decided to combine scenes from both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Carroll’s sequel to it, Thorough a Looking Glass, so some of the characters in Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland had to be eliminated. Disney even bought the rights to Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations so his animators could use them for the basis of the characters. The only main character Disney invented was the talking doorknob which appears near the first of the movie. He also took “The Unbirthday” segment from Through a Looking Glass and placed it at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

Although the public’s reception of “Alice In Wonderland” was disappointing, two songs from the film became very popular, “I’m Late” and “The Unbirthday Song”. Disney felt he had put too many characters in the movie and that the character of Alice lacked heart.

For those of us who love the book, we wish Walt Disney had stuck to the original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland storyline and cast. Twiddle Dee & Twiddle Dum could have been left out and the Duchess and the Mock Turtle could have been left in.

In the DVD edition’s bonus features of “Alice In Wonderland” is a segment of how the original song for the Cheshire Cat was recently discovered in a vault. It was called “I’m Odd” and it is played along with an animation that Disney himself might have approved of. Over 30 songs were written for the film altogether. So the putting together of Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland” was an adventure in itself.