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I’ve never read Lewis Carroll’s novel, but I loathe every film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland I’ve ever seen. Walt Disney’s animated version is marginally better than the studio’s hideously garish 2010 remake, but it’s just as aimless, pointless, and tediously annoying. There’s simply nothing in this story that I can latch onto or give a crap about.
Disney’s version falls in line with all the others: A prim and proper little girl stumbles into a nonsensical world full of nonsensical characters doing nonsensical things. The only thing driving the plot forward is that Alice is chasing a White Rabbit character. Why? Fuck if she knows. There’s a wacky tea party, a smoking caterpillar, a grinning cat, and a two idiots who tell a story about a walrus and a carpenter. Once we suffer through all those diversions, we finally get to what feels like the main storyline — Alice’s confrontation with the Queen of Hearts. But the film’s ultimate villain is as one-note and idiotic as the rest of the film, and she’s only in the last fifteen minutes of the movie.
What is the point of this story? I’m sure there is one, but it has evaded me for decades. At one point in the film, Alice beats herself up for never heeding her own advice. She assumes that her adventure in Wonderland is punishment for this deficiency in her character. But these narrative suggestions neither ring true in the Disney version, nor do they make for compelling stakes or motivation. The story is too episodic, without any coherent connective tissue — dramatically or thematically — to tie it all together. There’s never any indicators of how far along the journey we’ve come or how much further we have to go. We’re just stuck in this wacky world with this blonde twat without a map or a guidepost — it’s cinematic torture.
Some of the visuals are nice. I especially like the Queen’s card army, which Disney animates in Busby-Berkley-like choreographed numbers. Some of the songs are catchy, even though not one of them is given a full moment to flourish. But there’s little else I enjoy or appreciate about this movie. It’s perhaps the most irritating and unpleasant of all Disney’s animated classics.
Directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. With the voices of Kathryn Beaumont as Alice, Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter, Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat, and Verna Felton as the Queen of Hearts.
Oscar Nomination: Best Score (Oliver Wallace)