Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland was the 13th animated feature produced by Walt Disney Productions. It premiered at the end of July in 1951 and bombed at the box office, crushing Walt.
It was panned by literary critics who accused Disney of “Americanising” an English classic –Walt was not surprised at this criticism and frankly, he didn’t care. The film soon became a cult classic, however, thanks to television – it was featured on one of the first episodes of the Disneyland tv-series and gained popularity when it was released into cinemas years later.
It was particularly popular with the 1960s counterculture because of its curiously psychedelic, Salvador Dali-esqe surrealist narrative and aesthetic.
Alice at 70
When people ask me what my favourite Disney films are, they are often surprised that Alice in Wonderland is in my top five. They think the film is weird, disjointed, episodic, too short, even trippy!
I, on the other hand, will defend it till my dying breath. Not only does it feature an intelligent, independent, sassy, and curious young girl – not a teenage princess – but its production and aesthetic were heavily influenced by one of the few female animators at Disney in the 1950s – Mary Blair.
“No story in English literature has intrigued me more than Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. It fascinated me the first time I read it as a schoolboy and as soon as I possibly could, after I started making animated cartoons, I acquired the film rights to it.”
Walt Disney
Lewis Carroll, Laugh-O-Gram, and Alice Comedies
Alice in Wonderland is based on the Victorian nonsensical Alice books – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass – by mathematician, illustrator, poet, photographer, teacher, and inventor (deep breath) Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll.
Walt Disney loved Alice and he had his first crack at adapting her story in the early 1920s. Walt was twenty-one, working for Laugh-O-Gram Studio in Kansas City, Missouri, when he created a short featuring a live-action girl (Virginia Davis as Alice) interacting with an animated world.
The short wasn’t released to the public because Laugh-O-Gram went bankrupt, but Walt loved it so much that he saved it and used it to demonstrate what he was capable of to potential distributors. After some hardship, Walt and his brother Roy formed Disney Brothers Studios and produced their Alice Comedies, which ran from 1924 – 1927.
Walt tried producing an Alice feature throughout the 30s. He initially wanted to make a live-action version starring Hollywood sweetheart Mary Pickford but it was temporarily shelved in favour of 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (a decision that paid off) because he didn’t want to compete with Paramount’s 1933 adaptation of Alice.
Encouraged by the success of Snow White, Walt purchased the rights to the story and original illustrations in 1938 and hired various artists to storyboard concept art. Walt disliked the first concept artworks immensely – he thought they resembled the original illustrations too much, that they didn’t have the Disney style he was quickly becoming known for, and that the script that accompanied them was too dark.
Furthermore, because the original illustrations came from Sir John Tenniel, a newspaper illustrator, they didn’t translate well to film celluloid. They were very line heavy and while they worked well in their original context – static, on paper – this kind of art did not allow for the smooth movement of animation.
More work was needed. The project was shelved again until after the Second World War.
Alice after the War
In the late 1940s, Walt brought in British author Aldous Huxley to rework the script, but it too was too dark and too literal an adaptation. It just wouldn’t work on screen. Walt briefly considered making a live-action-and-animation version, like his early Alice Comedies – he considered Ginger Rogers and Lisa Davis (the voice of Anita in 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians) for Alice – but ultimately he felt only a fully animated version would do the book justice.
Due to the original novels’ lack of distinct plotlines, the storyboarders had major issues when trying to create something coherent for the screen. Characters and storylines were added and removed constantly, and certain aspects were scaled down because of time constraints. The original books’ famous Jabberwocky was omitted in favour of the Walrus and the Carpenter sequence, but we are treated to the fantastical creature in the 2010 Tim Burton adaptation.
Much of the humour and tone comes from Lewis Carroll’s writing, especially the poems, so Walt was keen to incorporate them in the form of songs because that translated better to screen. Over thirty potential songs – the most in any Disney film – were written by top songwriters of the era. While the songs are arguably not as memorable as the songs of the Disney Renaissance, they are nonsensical fun and really help set the mood for the strange events that unfold on screen.
The studio was pretty strapped for cash after the war and most of the Nine Old Men – Walt’s core team of original animators from the 20s – were working on Cinderella (1950). Cinderella is a much more classically inclined Disney film and its art style – pastel Baroque – took more time and dedication than Alice. While some of the animators did work on Alice herself, including Marc Davis, Les Clark, and Ollie Johnston, Cinderella was the studio’s priority.
Adding more fuel to the mess of a fire that was Alice’s production, Disney was battling a legal dispute with Dallas Bower, who had produced a French version of Alice in 1949. Walt sued Bower to stop it from being released in America.
Walt might have given up the idea altogether if it were not for artist and animator Mary Blair.
Artist, Animator, and Designer
Mary Blair was an artist, animator, and designer from Texas. She graduated from the Chouinard Art Institute and began her career in animation at Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer. She briefly worked with her husband and fellow artist Lee Blair at Ub Iwerks studio before moving to Disney in 1940. Mary worked on Dumbo (1940) and was responsible for the gut-wrenching ‘Baby Mine’ sequence, which was inspired by her multiple miscarriages and her longing to hold a child in her arms. She also worked on an early version of Lady and the Tramp (1955) before leaving animation to focus on fine art.
Walt did not truly recognise Mary’s talent until she accompanied him and his wife Lillian on a goodwill tour of South America during the Second World War. Walt wasn’t keen on being a goodwill ambassador, but he was able to justify the trip to himself by using it as an opportunity for artistic research. Mary’s husband Lee had been offered a spot on the trip to research Latin American aesthetics and, keen to take part in the research herself, Mary asked Walt for her job back. He accepted.
Mary adored the vibrant colours in Latin American art and created numerous watercolours inspired by them during their travels. Walt was so impressed with Mary’s work while on the tour that he made her the art supervisor for the animated feature films Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944). She became one of Disney’s most important concept artists. A concept artist is someone who explores a scene’s mood and emotion through colour and conveys a sense of a film’s style, but the works are not a part of a film’s final form.
Mary spent the rest of the 1940s working on various package films, including Fun and Fancy Free (1947), before working on the colour styling and concept art for Cinderella, Disney’s most profitable film since Snow White. She would go on to be a major influence on Peter Pan (1953), design several characters for Disneyland attractions, and illustrate children’s books. Of her work for Melody Time (1948) and The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), curator John Canemaker commented that ‘whether they be mundane seasonal changes or high drama, Blair comes through (as Joe Grant remarked) with inspiring and inspired suggestions for staging, color, and performance.’
The Magic of Mary Blair
The Magic of Mary Blair, a site dedicated to Mary and run by her nieces, describe her artistic style as ‘deceptively simple’ but with ‘enormous visual sophistication and craftsmanship in everything from colour choices to composition’ underneath’.
It was exceedingly modern for the time, leaning away from naturalism toward abstraction. She became one of Walt’s favourite artists; her nieces say that ‘he personally responded to her use of colour, naïve graphics, and the storytelling aspect in her pictures, especially the underlying emotions palpable in much of her art.’
Walt insisted on getting Mary’s art on screen, but it proved challenging. Ollie Johnston said it ‘was impossible. Her stuff is very flat!’ So while we don’t get to see Mary’s actual work on screen, her use of lighting, setting, spacing, props (especially in the mad tea party sequence) colour, and costume design is present throughout. Alice in Wonderland would not look the way it does without Mary.
The ‘flatness’ of her style was particularly influential on the Queen of Hearts sequences with her playing card army and the look of Alice came directly from Mary. In fact, Mary’s costume design was created for the voice actress of Alice, Kathryn Beaumont, to use in live-action reference sequences that were recorded to aid the animators during production.
In the end, over 350,000 drawings and paintings were used for Alice in Wonderland. More than 700 artists worked on the film, eight hundred gallons of special paint, weighing nearly five tons, were needed to paint the animated frames, and the mood of Wonderland was captured using more than 1000 shades of watercolours!
Mary left Disney in 1953 after the release of Peter Pan. While Disney did employ women, mostly as ‘inkers’ during the Golden Age, they were very much underrepresented and underappreciated within the studio. In fact, when Mary died in the 70s, her obituary was at the back of the newsletter while an accountant’s was on the first page. Talk about being underappreciated!
In honour of Mary and the many other female artists within Disney, the BanterFlix team recommends checking out Nathalia Holt’s book The Queens of Animation: The Untold Story of the Women Who Transformed the World of Disney and Made Cinematic History.
Holt was inspired to write the book when she discovered that 99% of the Walt Disney books she read didn’t feature stories about the studio’s women: ‘I was dismayed to find that these stories I wanted to hear just didn’t exist,’ she said, ‘they had been left out of these history books. And so it became really important to me to be able to document their histories, especially considering the state of women in animation today.’
Happy anniversary Alice in Wonderland and a very merry unbirthday to you, reader!
