‘Alice in Wonderland’ at 75 - Curiouser and More Beloved Than Ever
Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland premiered 75 years ago today on September 14, 1951. It was Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 13th animated feature, directed by the trio of Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, fresh off their previous collaborations on Melody Time (1948) and Cinderella (1950), and adapted both of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) – compressing and recombining episodes from both.
The film’s box office reception was tepid at the time, and the response from literary critics, particularly in Carroll’s native England, was often openly hostile – a reaction that makes a certain amount of sense once you actually sit with what Disney’s artists did to the material. Carroll’s Alice, as rendered in John Tenniel’s original illustrations, was a plain, sensible English girl navigating a landscape of anarchic logic with growing exasperation. Disney’s Alice, voiced by Kathryn Beaumont, is a rosy-cheeked ingenue who sings about bluebirds and friendly how-de-do birds – a sister to Snow White and Cinderella rather than a literary descendant of Carroll’s dry, precocious heroine. The Mad Hatter is inseparable from Ed Wynn’s distinctive comic voice. The March Hare belongs as much to Jerry Colonna as to Carroll. These are not translations of literary characters so much as complete reinventions, filtered entirely through the sensibility of the studio that made them.
And yet, even among these reservations about fidelity, audiences and film critics couldn’t help but admit that the film succeeded gloriously on its own terms. The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther even admitted:
“...if you are not too particular about the images of Carroll and Tenniel, if you are high on Disney whimsey and if you’ll take a somewhat slow, uneven pace, you should find this picture entertaining. Especially should it be for the kids, who are not so demanding of fidelity as are their moms and dads. A few of the episodes are dandy, such as the mad tea party and the caucus race; the music is tuneful and sugary and the color is excellent.”
Watching the film, Crowther wrote, is “something like nibbling those wafers that Alice eats” – a perfect description of a film built less around narrative propulsion than around the accumulated pleasure of one strange, self-contained episode after another. Alice in Wonderland does not build toward anything in particular; it simply moves from marvel to marvel, trusting the strength of each individual sequence to carry the whole. What makes this approach work, ultimately, is the sheer density of craft behind it. More than half a million drawings went into the film’s production, and Disney’s use of extensive live-action reference footage – actors performing scenes on a soundstage to guide animators studying movement and expression, with Beaumont herself serving as the physical reference model for Alice – gave the film’s fantastical characters a grounding in genuine human performance that elevates the whimsy rather than undermining it. As Disney Animation Research Library manager Fox Carney observed, this is a film in which “animation makes the flowers sing,” where a striped cat can vanish slowly into thin air, and any day other than a birthday can become, without any narrative justification required, an “unbirthday.”
The film’s musical density – nearly every sequence built around its own song – gives the whole a structure that functions more like a revue than a conventional feature, and it is precisely this quality that has aged into one of the film’s most beloved qualities. Successive generations have continued to discover Alice in Wonderland not despite its narrative looseness but partly because of it; the film rewards revisiting individual sequences on their own terms in a way that more tightly plotted films rarely do, which is the exact reason why its expansive cast of supporting characters have become regular fixtures in every Hot Topic.
Disney’s fascination with Carroll’s world long predated the 1951 feature, stretching back to the Alice Comedies of the 1920s – 56 silent shorts blending a live actress with animated environments, produced under Walt’s first distribution agreement with Margaret Winkler. That decades-long gestation between an idea and its fullest realization is itself a testament to how thoroughly Wonderland captured Disney’s imagination, and the eventual 1951 feature represents the culmination of that fascination rather than merely one project among many.
Following their successful work on Alice in Wonderland, Geronimi, Jackson, and Luske would go on afterward to direct the studio’s next two films Peter Pan (1953) and Lady and the Tramp (1955) together as well. Meanwhile, Alice in Wonderland’s afterlife has extended well beyond the animated original, with the film even receiving a pair of live-action direct sequels from Walt Disney Pictures: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), which grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, and its follow-up Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), both written by longtime Disney screenwriter Linda Woolverton and bringing Carroll’s characters to new audiences through an entirely different visual register.
The film’s 75th anniversary this year has occasioned a genuinely extensive restoration effort – scanning 324,000 frames from the original 1951 nitrate Technicolor negative, with a hundred artists spending six months and roughly ten thousand hours on damage repair and cleaning, all in service of the studio’s stated goal of channeling original artistic intent rather than imposing contemporary taste. That level of care speaks to something important about how the film’s reputation has evolved. With three-quarters of a century of hindsight, it’s only fitting that Disney’s Alice in Wonderland has ultimately become the defining visual representation of Lewis Carroll’s imagination in modern popular culture.
Alice in Wonderland is available for purchase on Blu-ray and streaming on Disney+, freshly restored, and is still, 75 years to the day, curiouser and more beloved than ever.