The new trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is out, and it’s an improvement over the teaser, but I still can’t say I’m excited. Regardless, I thought it would be fun to look back at some previous non-animated Alices.
5. Alice (1989)
This is far from Jan Svankmajer’s best film, but it stands out as an inarguably unique take on the Wonderland story. Rather than an expansive landscape, Wonderland is depicted as a labyrinthine house of tiny rooms and cramped passageways (not unlike the Hell of Svankmajer’s Faust). The White Rabbit has been stuffed and mounted, and the Mad Hatter and March Hare trade heads rather than seats. When Alice shrinks, she transforms from a real little girl into an animated china doll. In short, this adaptation is purposely as creepy as possible in every way. It’s neither faithful nor child-friendly, but it’s definitely worth a watch.
4. Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy (1976)
What can you say about a 1970’s hardcore porn version of Alice in Wonderland? To begin with, it’s a musical, which makes for a truly strange generic blend. Like a lot of vintage porn, the hardcore sequences are the least interesting bits (containing very little that could actually be called sexy), whereas the pun-filled dialogue, the scanty costumes, and the full and flowing 1970’s hair (on their heads and everywhere else) are consistently amusing. This was produced by Bill Osco, who was also responsible for the classic Flesh Gordon.
3. Alice in Wonderland (1966)
This British production (originally broadcast on the BBC) views Carroll’s story through the lens of mid-20th Century Art Cinema. Think “Alice at Marienbad.” There was no script—the actors just improvised around the text of the novel. There are also no animal costumes—each creature is just a person, except for the Cheshire Cat, who’s just a cat. In watching the Tea Party scene, the conclusion seems inescapable that costumes were out of the question once they’d spent the entire budget on drugs. Also check out the Frog Footman, who’s easily the funniest character in the film.
2. Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass (1985)
Irwin Allen produced this big budget star-studded musical TV miniseries spectacular in the grand 1980’s tradition. Natalie Gregory stands out as a rare age-appropriate Alice, and handles the dialogue exceptionally for such a tiny child. There are a few too many winks to the cast’s other work to regard it as a faithful adaptation (Telly Salivas as a bald Cheshire Cat exclaims, “Meow, Baby!”), but it’s mostly a lot of fun, and the length allows for the inclusion of characters who make it into few adaptations, such as the Horse, the Goat, and the Newspaper-suited Man on the train. No other incarnation of the caterpillar has ever been as likable as Sammy Davis, Jr., who does a tap number to Father William. There are also some surprisingly frightening scenes, such as the encounters with the Jabberwocky and the truly disturbing bit where Carol Channing turns into a sheep.
1. Great Performances: Alice in Wonderland (1983)
The 1982 Broadway production of Alice was adapted for PBS, and it’s really something special. The costumes and sets are taken directly from the Tenniel drawings, so much so that they’re largely black and white with crosshatching. Alice is played by twentysomething Kate Burton, whose theatrical acting style doesn’t stand up to the camera’s scrutiny. Fortunately, she’s balanced out by legends like Colleen Dewhurst, Maureen Stapleton, and Donald O’Connor. I saw this as a small child, and was terrified by the Cheshire Cat’s bald, claw-sharpening human form. As an adult, my favorite scene is the tea party, in which avant garde theatre legend Andre Gregory and a strikingly handsome young Zeljko Ivanek play the Mad Hatter and the March Hare as a bitchy gay couple.
Since tonight is the beginning of Hanukkah, I was originally going to post Betty Boop’s only Winter Holiday cartoon, Thrills and Chills. Unfortunately, that cartoon just isn’t very good. Betty doesn’t sing in it, and it’s very late in her career (1938) when she’d become much more vanilla and boring. There’s some lovely rotoscoped ice skating, and a nice little bit with Pudgy chasing a fish that’s under the ice, but that’s about it. And since I posted a lackluster cartoon last Friday, I figured I should share something that’s actually worth seeing today, or people will just give up on this feature entirely. So here, despite its lack of connection to the holidays, is Betty in Blunderland:
As you can see, this short follows the same Fleischerian adaptation formula as Snow White: abandon the narrative completely, stage a barely related musical number, and then run from a dragon. Fortunately, this is a formula that the Fleischers excel at, whereas their more faithful adaptations tend to be far less interesting. However, the animators do make some effort to pay homage to John Tenniel’s Wonderland, particularly in the appearance of characters like the Walrus and the Carpenter. I also love the way Betty takes on a more Alice-like appearance on crossing through the looking glass.
Strangely enough, the face in the jam jar is a caricature of comedian Ed Wynn, who would go on to voice the Mad Hatter seventeen years later in Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. The Shrink-Ola is a nice bit of fun, particularly when the card-man’s 10 becomes a 2 as he shrinks. The cheeky moment where the dress doesn’t shrink along with Alice seems much more appropriate in a Betty Boop cartoon than in the trailer for the upcoming Tim Burton film, don’t you think?
The song Betty sings is written to the tune of the Marx Brothers number “Everyone Says I Love You,” which later became a Woody Allen film, of course. I don’t know that you could call it a parody, or even an homage, exactly, it just has the same tune for some reason. It works, though, as a fun way to introduce as many Carroll characters as possible all at once, so they can get on to doing cute little dances. The craps game between the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon is one of my favorite bits, although I also really like the grumbly sounds the Walrus makes as he dances.
Then of course the Jabberwocky (looking nothing like Tenniel’s version) shows up so the obligatory chase sequence can begin. The part where the turtles blast him with a machine gun is striking because there’s no attempt to soften the look of the gun- to somehow make it a whimsical or “turtly” sort of gun- that’s just a big machine gun, mounted on one turtle, being fired by a smaller turtle.
Everything is magically resolved when they all fall off a cliff, and Betty wakes up on her floor. Of course, this being the World of Boop, the real world has the same potential for surrealism as the dream world, as we see Betty wake up just in time to keep the White Rabbit from sneaking off again.
I recently got to attend a screening of Copyright Criminals, which is an excellent documentary about the history of sampling in music. As I’ve always been an advocate (and occasional creator) of art which incorporates found sounds and images, this put me in the mood to find something along those lines. This video’s been around a while, but it’s probably my favorite sample-built piece on YouTube.
I love that it’s not just the images that are drawn from Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, but all the sounds as well. This is not a fannish attempt to create a video “tribute” to Alice, or to tell the movie’s story in musical form. Instead, it takes the pieces from the film and reassembles them into something entirely other.
There’s a haunting quality to the song Pogo creates, and it’s accentuated by the lack of coherent lyrics. He cuts apart and reassembles Katherine Beaumont’s dialogue so that there are snatches of discernible words, but they don’t go anywhere. The lines that get stuck in my head seem to say, “There is a long way… it’s a long, bitter [gibberish],” which I find unsettling in that good way. This Alice is lost inside her own mind, and can’t even explain how she got there. And as if that weren’t bad enough, those creepy flowers won’t stop singing.
This reading is supported by the visuals, which accentuate the contrast between Alice’s growing concern about getting home and the flippancy of the other characters. You’ll also note that although things calm down at the end of the video, she never actually wakes up.
Can I just take a minute to say how completely not excited I am about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wondlerland? Most of his recent movies have been all style and no substance, and this looks to be no exception. And it’s always the same style- that ornate, lacey, top hat, striped tights, perky-goth thing. Corpse Bride, for example, had no memorable songs, no story to speak of, and no fleshed out characters. Just an hour and a half of that Tim Burton style. And of course Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter, who are pretty much a permanent part of the style these days.
So today I saw the photo of Depp as the Mad Hatter…
Wow. That’s pretty hideous. And then Bonham-Carter (the Red Queen) has some kind of digital thing done to her head-body ratio, which puts her squarely in the uncanny valley:
And for some reason Anne Hathaway (the White Queen) looks exactly like she did in her final scene in Brokeback Mountain, when she was playing a seemingly bloodless platinum blonde Texas trophy wife.
Not a look I would expect her to want to return to. For curiosity’s sake, I do wish they’d included a portrait of Alice herself, since she’s, you know, the lead character and all.
And while I’m complaining, what’s with the inclusion of characters from both books, and the apparent conflation of the Red Queen and the Queen of Hearts? If this is supposed to be a big family blockbuster, wouldn’t it make more sense to stick to Wonderland for this movie, so you can save Through the Looking Glass to be a sequel? But then, fidelity to the source material has never been Burton’s strong suit. Unfortunately, I’m no longer sure what his strong suit is. Top hats?
Wow. That’s pretty hideous. And then Bonham-Carter (the Red Queen) has some kind of digital thing done to her head-body ratio, which puts her squarely in the uncanny valley:
And for some reason Anne Hathaway (the White Queen) looks exactly like she did in her final scene in Brokeback Mountain, when she was playing a seemingly bloodless platinum blonde Texas trophy wife.
Not a look I would expect her to want to return to. For curiosity’s sake, I do wish they’d included a portrait of Alice herself, since she’s, you know, the lead character and all.
