9 / 10
Official trailer
Disney’s Strangest Classic
Alice in Wonderland is the strangest film Disney made in its classic era. It has no real plot, no villain who matters until the last few minutes and no romance. It’s a string of encounters with talking animals, mad hatters and angry playing cards, each one weirder than the last, strung together by a girl who keeps getting smaller and larger and increasingly lost.
Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske directed it, and it came out in 1951. It was a commercial and critical disappointment, and Walt Disney himself said it lacked heart. Twenty years later, a generation of college students rediscovered it and embraced it, and it has been a classic ever since. I give it a 9, and I’m with the college students. It’s cold, it’s odd and it wanders, and I adore it anyway, because no other Disney feature of its era looks or sounds this unhinged.
Walt’s Long Obsession
Walt Disney had wanted to make Alice for most of his career. His early Alice Comedies, in the 1920s, had put a live-action girl in a cartoon world, and he had tried and abandoned several versions of a feature, including one that would have mixed live action and animation. The novelist Aldous Huxley was brought in at one stage to work on a script. Nothing worked.
The problem was always the same. Lewis Carroll’s two books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, are full of wordplay, logic puzzles and satire of Victorian manners, and they have no conventional story. Alice wanders from one absurd encounter to another, and then wakes up. Turning that into a film audiences could follow, and care about, was a problem Disney never fully solved.
The finished film combines episodes and characters from both books, and it keeps Carroll’s episodic structure instead of forcing a traditional plot onto it. That was either its great strength or its fatal weakness, depending on whom you ask. The decision gives the film its dreamlike freedom, and it’s also why so many viewers have found it hard to engage with emotionally.
For Writers
Carroll’s books have no conventional plot, and Disney kept the episodic structure instead of forcing a story onto it. The choice made the film strange and beautiful, and hard to love.
When you adapt a work with an unusual structure, there’s a strong pull to reshape it into something conventional. Sometimes the unusual structure makes the work.
Before adapting a source, decide what makes its structure distinctive, and choose whether to keep it or replace it. Don’t let the choice happen by default.
Mary Blair’s Colours
The film’s look came largely from Mary Blair, a brilliant designer and color stylist whose bold, flat, modern paintings shaped several Disney films of the period. Her concept art for Alice is full of vivid pinks, purples, greens and oranges, with stylized flowers, strange geometric forests and surreal skies. They look more like modern art than like the storybook illustrations Disney had used for Snow White and Pinocchio.
The finished film softens her designs somewhat, but her influence is everywhere, and it gives Alice a vivid, dreamlike quality unlike any earlier Disney film. The backgrounds of the Tulgey Wood, the garden of talking flowers and the Queen’s croquet ground are some of the best the studio ever produced. Even now, it looks modern.
Blair’s color does more for me than any song in the film. I could watch the garden of talking flowers and the Tulgey Wood with the sound off and still come away happy, and I can say that about very few animated features from any studio.
Blair went on to design the It’s a Small World ride at Disneyland, and her style became instantly recognizable in American design. Alice is among the best examples of it, and her original concept paintings for the film are now treasured as works of art in their own right.
The Encounters
Alice follows a panicking White Rabbit down a rabbit hole and into Wonderland, and from there the film is a series of set pieces. She meets Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who tell her the story of the Walrus and the Carpenter, a darkly funny tale in which a walrus eats a family of trusting baby oysters. Later she meets a haughty caterpillar who blows smoke letters at her, and a garden of singing flowers who decide she’s a weed.
Each episode is its own little film, with its own songs, jokes and style, and some are much better than others. The film has more songs than any Disney feature before it, many of them short and fragmentary, and they include some of the studio’s catchiest tunes: I’m Late, All in the Golden Afternoon and Painting the Roses Red.
The episodic structure means the film is never boring for long. It also means there’s little to carry you from one scene to the next except Alice herself and her growing frustration. Some viewers love that freedom and treat each scene as a small, self-contained delight. Others find themselves waiting for a story that never arrives.
The Mad Tea Party
The most famous sequence is the Mad Tea Party, where Alice finds the Mad Hatter and the March Hare celebrating their unbirthdays, the 364 days of the year that aren’t anyone’s birthday. Ed Wynn voices the Hatter and Jerry Colonna the March Hare, and both were comedians with instantly recognizable voices and styles. The animators matched them perfectly.
It’s pure chaos: teacups smashing, a dormouse being stuffed into a teapot, pointless questions and the Unbirthday Song, sung with manic energy. It’s very funny, and it captures Carroll’s nonsense better than any other part of the film. Wynn’s giggling, rambling Hatter is one of the great comic performances in Disney animation.
The Tea Party is the sequence I’d keep if I could keep only one, and Wynn is the reason. His Hatter sounds like he’s about to fall apart laughing at his own jokes, and the animators catch every twitch of it. If the whole film ran at this pitch, I’d be giving it a 10.
The sequence also shows how well the film translates Carroll’s wordplay into visual comedy. The characters argue about nonsense, change places around the table and pour tea into cups that don’t exist, and the animation keeps up with the dialogue’s lunatic logic at every step. It’s the scene where the film most fully justifies its reputation as the strangest thing Disney ever made.
The Cheshire Cat
Sterling Holloway voices the Cheshire Cat, a pink-and-purple striped cat who appears and disappears at will, leaving only his grin, and who gives Alice unhelpful directions and cheerfully admits that everyone in Wonderland is mad, including her. Holloway’s lazy, amused voice makes him one of the film’s most memorable characters.
The cat is also the film’s mischief-maker, drifting through scenes and causing trouble, and he’s the one who sets up the finale by turning the Queen’s temper against Alice. The image of his floating grin has become a Disney landmark, and he’s the character most people remember when they think of the film.
His song, taken from Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky, is sung in a lazy drawl as he appears and disappears around Alice, and it’s one of the film’s best moments of pure, unsettling nonsense. He’s never quite a villain, and never quite a friend. He’s the purest expression of Wonderland itself: charming, unreliable, amused by everything and completely indifferent to whether Alice ever finds her way home.
Tulgey Wood
The saddest and strangest sequence in the film comes near the end, when Alice, fed up, tries to go home and finds herself lost in the Tulgey Wood, a dark forest full of bizarre creatures: birds made of umbrellas, ducks with horn beaks and animals shaped like pencils and mirrors. None of them speak, and none of them help her.
Alice sits down and cries, and sings Very Good Advice, a lovely, melancholy song about how she gives herself good advice and never follows it. It’s the one moment where the film pauses and lets us feel Alice’s loneliness, and it’s the closest it comes to the heart Walt felt was missing. Kathryn Beaumont, who voiced Alice and later Wendy in Peter Pan, sings it beautifully.
Very Good Advice is the scene that moves me. It’s the only time the film lets Alice be a lost, frightened child, and I’d put the song on any list of the studio’s loveliest. I wish Disney had trusted a few more quiet minutes like it.
For Writers
Tulgey Wood is the one scene where the film pauses and lets Alice cry. It gives the story a moment of real feeling in a film otherwise built on nonsense.
In a story built on comedy or spectacle, a single quiet moment of vulnerability can give the reader the emotional anchor they’ve been missing.
Find the moment in your story where your protagonist is most alone, and slow down. Give them a moment to feel it, without jokes and without rescue. My article on humor in writing goes further.
The Queen of Hearts
Its finale takes place in the garden of the Queen of Hearts, a furious, tiny-tempered tyrant who orders beheadings for the slightest offense. Verna Felton voices her with a booming, hilarious rage, and her card soldiers, painting her white roses red to avoid her fury, are one of the film’s best comic images.
Alice plays croquet with flamingos and hedgehogs, is put on trial and finally escapes in a wild chase back through Wonderland, as all the characters she has met pursue her. She wakes up by the riverbank, and her sister is still reading to her. The finale is satisfying and dizzying, and it gives the film the momentum its middle sometimes lacks.
Why It Flopped
When Alice came out in 1951, it was a disappointment. British critics accused Disney of vulgarizing a beloved classic, American audiences found it cold and confusing, and the box office was poor. Walt himself admitted that Alice had no heart, that audiences couldn’t feel for a girl who was merely curious and irritated.
He had a point. Alice is a spectator more than a heroine. She wants nothing more than to go home, and she has no friends in Wonderland, no one to love and no one to save. The film is a series of bizarre encounters that she observes and escapes, and without an emotional anchor, it’s easy to admire and hard to love.
For Writers
Walt said Alice had no heart, because she wants nothing except to go home. A protagonist who only observes is hard to care about.
Give your observer-hero a specific, personal goal in the strange world, beyond a wish to leave. Let each encounter bring them closer to it or push them further away. For a protagonist in a strange world, curiosity alone rarely sustains the reader’s sympathy. They need to want something the world keeps from them.
The Rediscovery
Alice was shown on television in the fifties and later re-released, and by the early seventies it had found a new audience. College students, drawn to its surreal images, its colors and its themes of madness and mind-altering substances, began screening it on campuses, and Disney re-released it in 1974 with marketing aimed squarely at them.
It has been a classic ever since, and its reputation has only grown. Its episodic, dreamlike structure, once seen as a weakness, now seems like its great strength, and its visual inventiveness has influenced generations of animators and designers. It’s the Disney film that feels closest to a dream, and in an age that values strangeness, it has come to seem ahead of its time.
It has also influenced later adaptations. Tim Burton’s live-action version in 2010, with Johnny Depp as the Hatter, borrowed its designs and characters, and the Mad Tea Party remains a fixture of the Disney parks. The 1951 film is still the version of Wonderland most people picture, and every later version has been measured against it.
Where Alice in Wonderland Falls Short
The heart problem Walt identified is real. Alice is hard to feel much for, and the film’s episodic structure means some sequences drag. The film occasionally feels more like a collection of brilliant short cartoons than a single story. Watching it in one sitting can be exhausting, and some of the weaker episodes, like the Caterpillar’s scene, outstay their welcome.
Everything else about it is outstanding: the designs, the colors, the comic performances, the songs and the sheer inventiveness of every scene. It deserves a 9. It’s not the Disney film I’d show a young child first, but it’s the one I’d show anyone interested in what animation can do, and it gets more beautiful with every viewing.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Alice in Wonderland shows the cost of a protagonist who wants nothing but to leave. The world around her is dazzling, and without a personal goal, she becomes a spectator to her own story.
Set a story in a fantastical world and the world can easily overwhelm the character. The reader needs a reason to care what happens to the person walking through it.
Give your protagonist one want that belongs to them, beyond escape, and let the strange world test it. The spectacle will mean more if it’s standing in their way.
The Verdict on Alice in Wonderland
Yes. It’s a 9, and it’s Disney’s strangest and most visually daring classic. Walt was right that it lacks heart, and that’s the point I take off, but I’d trade a dozen warmer, safer Disney films for the Mad Tea Party, the Cheshire Cat and Mary Blair’s colors. Watch it for those, and let the story go.
