Any number of timeless stories have made their mark on film, art, or culture. The tale of Elizabeth and Darcy has been re-enacted on screen after screen, Greek mythologies have been brought to life in every form of art and the sentiments of cult classics like ‘Animal Farm’ 1945 have echoed across a multitude of generations. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ 1865 is one of the elusive few that has succeeded in impacting across the board. The secret of its popularity lies in the unexpected familiarity of Alice’s obscure, surrealist dreamland, and the wealth of strange characters that inhabit it. It is unsurprising that artists and writers have been compelled to create their own interpretations of Wonderland and surely the most memorable translation of which in the past century is Walt Disney’s. But what is it that made this story so appealing to the animated movie mogul and artists alike?
It is no secret that Carroll had a connection to the art scene of his time visiting theatres and galleries regularly; famously befriending members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood who shared an interest in themes of dreams and innocence. The Victorian art world had a fascination with the child-figure, normally as a symbol of innocence, but also mainly due to the fact that the level of infant mortality was so high that the notion of childhood took on a precarious nature. Many wealthy parents would take any opportunity to commission portraits of their children, as to immortalise them in a way. Carroll in his literature was no different and his masterpiece initially began life as a simple present for three daughters of a friend, one of whom was the inspiration for the character of Alice. As the stories were being primed for publication Carroll employed the illustrative talents of John Tenniel, a cartoonist for Punch magazine, as he felt the work of an experienced illustrator would support the text with visual expression. With the visual aid of Tenniel’s illustrations Alice’s adventures captivated the minds of artists for decades to come. The question the caterpillar poses, “Who are you?” is echoed in every art form and movement.
“Artists who overly cite the visual imagery of [Carroll’s] book establish a relationship between their work and his texts, triggering associations, appealing to the viewers’ powers of recollection and inviting them to read the work through the lens of the literary source.” (Delahunty and Schulz, 2011)
Memory as a topic is a running central theme of the Alice books, connecting memory to the construction of identity. 
In the century that followed the Surrealist movement was the first to really be influenced by Alice. They saw Carroll as
“Surrealist avant a lettre, an artistic predecessor and soul mate, whose literary worlds and characters seemed to prefigure many of their own anti-rationalist perspectives.” (Delahunty and Schulz, 2011)
British Surrealists were playfully given the nickname ‘Children of Alice’ due to their fondness of recreating Carroll’s favourite themes. Much like the works of Surrealists, Alice’s world does not allow itself to be constrained by the laws of nature or reason. In Wonderland she experiences an intermingling and distortion of time and space, a theme that is perhaps most recognisably Surrealist due to Dali’s famous melting clock painting ‘The Persistence of Memory’, 1931. Another particularly Surrealist connection and tactic favoured by Giorgio de Chirico, is misuse of everyday items. In ‘Through the Looking-glass’ 1871 Alice comes across amusingly anatomically confused creatures like rocking-horse flies and bread and butter flies. All dislocation of meaning in Wonderland is natural to us as it is facilitated by Alice’s dream state.
The Alice books are admired in many ways, but most of all for succeeding in resembling the true course of a dream, in all it’s inconsistencies, aimless eccentricities. The fashion in which things that Alice encounters in waking life are reflected with exaggeration in her dreamland is a common occurrence in our own dreams. Wonderland obeys no conventional material rules but transforms itself constantly into something else, through a kind of nightmarishly innocent logic. Although Alice’s dreams are nonsense, they are a natural kind of nonsense that we can all relate to our own nonsense. It’s a free-form reflection of the inner-workings of a collective imagination and somehow makes sense to us because in its own chaotic way Wonderland reflects how we all feel and view the real world. There’s something comforting, yet invigorating in the reflection of ourselves and our surroundings that we find in Wonderland; a feat that every artist without exception aims to imbue in their work.
Similarly, artists have for centuries been searching for some way of capturing that elusive “spark of life” in their work.
“For some presumptuous reason, man feels the need to create something of his own that appears to be living, that has an inner strength, a vitality, a separate identity – something that speaks out with authority – a creation that gives the illusion of life.” (Thomas and Johnston, 1981)
Innovations in photographic technology in the late 1800’s allows the possibility of animation to be born; an art form that could capture that spark in a figure’s slightest movement or expression. Here was a medium for the comic artist to create their own depictions, allowing them to satirize, caricature or humourise any person, place or thing they set their mind to. The bright and colourful new world was their oyster. For,
“Just as the stained glass window had brought dazzling brilliance after centuries of relatively dull frescoes, the introduction of light behind the film made whole new ranges of colour available to the artist.” (Thomas and Johnston, 1981)
Enter Walt Disney in the 1920’s, with his first official foray into film and animation, a series of Alice Comedies, with a young actress, Virginia Davis playing a real life Alice travelling through a graphic cartoon world. As the studio evolved it developed a unique kind of style, the secret behind which is in equal parts a constant innovation of new technologies and the ability to communicate emotion. The Disney studios employ hundreds of artists to work at different stages of the animation. Hand-drawn and painted characters on celluloid paper are filmed over watercolour backgrounds from above by what was dubbed The Master Camera. A contraption formulated within the studio made up levels that could move independently, allowing the characters and background to convey depth. It is undoubtably the exquisite hand painted detail and irresistible “spark of life” in every frame of the classic Disney films that make up that distinct visual style. Combining a good narrative with the beautiful work of his artists created films that an audience just couldn’t look away from.
Walt Disney spent decades searching for the right style, and narrative structure for ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and he finally reached a point where he was happy with it in the late 1940’s thanks to the style that concept artist Mary Blair proposed. Blair tended to work in flat, bold and bright colours with interesting shapes and warped perspectives so Alice was almost tailor-made for her. Disney deduced that the narrative structuring problems could be resolved by injecting a musical or rhythmical momentum. Thus, the music and visual style of Alice needed to go hand in hand, and so the animators and composers set out to have them engage with one another, allowing flowers to sing and spider webs to twang. The artists became so detail oriented that they enlisted the actress, Kathryn Beaumont, into performing live action scenes as inspiration for Alice’s movement and form. Ed Wynn, who played the Mad Hatter, joined her to enact the tea party scene. He wound up including unwritten actions that the animators loved and added immediately. One particular system of the old Disney studio that is more evident in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ than any other film of its time is its directorship. The film was broken down into sections, each directed by a different person and ultimately one can recognise the transition from one man’s vision to another’s; granted this aids the story’s fractured, dreamlike quality.
The most classic Disney films resonate and have a habit of becoming part of our collective consciousness, you’d be hard pushed to find someone today that could not recount what substance helps the medicine go down or sing you a very, very unbirthday. Often Alice in Wonderland is dismissed, firstly for not being one of the great Disney narratives; in other words a Monomyth and secondly for falling short of Disney’s expectations for its success upon original release. The studio’s biggest challenge for Alice was coming up with a concrete plan of how to shape the film, not only because of how inconsistent the storyline of the source material is but also for how much there is to it. On the other hand, Disney films normally adhere to the structure of the Monomyth, or Hero’s Journey. A theory that all great myths or stories follow the same patterns, published by writer and mythologist Joseph Campbell in ‘The Hero With a Thousand Faces’ in 1949. A copy of Campbell’s book began to circulate about the Disney offices leading to one of the studio’s head scriptwriters, Christopher Volger, writing up a seven page company memo titled ‘A Practical Guide to The Hero With a Thousand Faces’. In his memo he claims that with the analytical tools provided a writer can shape a dramatic, entertaining and psychologically sound story around any situation.
“With them you can always determine what’s wrong with a story that’s floundering, and you can find a better solution to almost any story problem by examining the pattern laid out in the book.” (Volger)
It is perhaps Disney’s recognition of the effectiveness of the monomyth that draws the studio of particular types of stories; namely fairy tales. ‘Alice in Wonderland’, 1951, could be called an unconventional monomyth, it doesn’t necessarily comply to the twelve stages Volger outlines but it does feature much of them in its own distorted, surreal style. Due to the haphazard nature of the dream scape of Wonderland, the Disney writers couldn’t fit the storyline into the monomythic pattern, and as a consequence were at a loss where to begin preparing it for the screen. 
Composition by David Hall An artist called David Hall put together a storyboard of artwork drawing from Tenniel’s works in the late 1930’s. His designs were considered almost grotesque in their dark, over detailed nature, but many of Hall’s Tenniel inspired shot compositions made it into the 1951 film;and ultimately, what anchored Alice into a story an animator could visualise was the original woodblock illustrations that Tenniel provided. Mary Blair may have set the colouring and style for the film, but the mise-en-scene of each frame still calls back to the illustrations. The composition of particular scenes mirror those in the books. The scene in which Alice grows too big for the White Rabbit’s house, for instance, is a prime example. Tenniel details Alice’s limbs escaping out the window and door, with her head bowed against the ceiling, a pose that is mimicked distinctly in Disney’s film. Furthermore, animators on the film pulled their character designs directly from the illustrations.
“Alice figures are recognisable by virtue of their clothing.” (Delahunty and Schulz, 2011)
The character designs that Tenniel devised have stood the test of time. Alice’s blue dress and white pinafore have acted as a signifier for artists alluding to Carroll for so long that Disney’s animators had no choice but to dress her in such a way. And all of the Wonderland residents like The Mad Hatter, March Hare and Cheshire Cat are even rounded out, rosy cheeked versions of Tenniel’s creations.
Has Disney subsequently then succeeded in taking the characters directly from the page and giving them the illusion life? Or one could argue that Carroll and Tenniel were successful in creating characters that are so alive that artists are drawn to them by a desire to do the same in their own work.
1. Cavalier, S (2011), The World History of Animation. London, Aurum Press Ltd.
2. Delahunty, G. and Schulz, C. (2011) Alice in Wonderland Through The Visual Arts. Liverpool, Tate Publishing.
3. Earle, W. (1987), A Surrealism of the Movies. Chicago, Precedent Publishing, Inc.
4. Feild, R. D. (1944), The Art of Walt Disney. London, Collins.
5. Thomas, F. and Johnston, O. (1981) Disney Animation The Illusion of Life. New York, Abbeville Press.
6. Volger, C. (n/a) A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. http://www.cs.uu.nl/docs/vakken/b2go/literature/monomyth.pdf
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