The best thing about Lewis Carroll's Alice books, by far, is the poetry. As books they really aren't so great as they are made out to be; but ... Jabberwocky! You Are Old, Father William! Humpty Dumpty's poem about the fish! These are masterpieces.
The poetry can't make it to the screen and Disney's attempts to work in bits of "The Walrus and the Carpenter", "Jabberwocky", "How Doth the Little Crocodile", and perhaps others that don't leap to mind at the moment, as song lyrics and chanted pieces of verse, is contrived. When the Caterpillar says, in effect, "I will now recite a poem" ... why, it's just asking us to fall asleep.
There has never been a good screen adaptation of the Alice books and there can't be. This may be the pick of the bunch. (Not, I admit, that I have tortured myself by watching every one of them to make sure.) Carroll's atmosphere is gone but it has been replaced with a different atmosphere, that of the Disney studios entering the 1950s and deciding that backgrounds must now look surpassingly strange. Disney did wonders making the setting dreamlike and claustrophobic - as Tenniel did in a highly different way. Indeed Disney does necessary work that Tenniel was inclined to neglect.
After a while, though, our nerve-endings become raw as one village eccentric after another is being paraded in front of us; and Alice's incessant monologue doesn't help. I defy you to be caught up in the story. It can't be done. To watch this you need to be determined to grimly forge ahead and attend to the images - for they really are memorable images.
The poetry can't make it to the screen and Disney's attempts to work in bits of "The Walrus and the Carpenter", "Jabberwocky", "How Doth the Little Crocodile", and perhaps others that don't leap to mind at the moment, as song lyrics and chanted pieces of verse, is contrived. When the Caterpillar says, in effect, "I will now recite a poem" ... why, it's just asking us to fall asleep.
There has never been a good screen adaptation of the Alice books and there can't be. This may be the pick of the bunch. (Not, I admit, that I have tortured myself by watching every one of them to make sure.) Carroll's atmosphere is gone but it has been replaced with a different atmosphere, that of the Disney studios entering the 1950s and deciding that backgrounds must now look surpassingly strange. Disney did wonders making the setting dreamlike and claustrophobic - as Tenniel did in a highly different way. Indeed Disney does necessary work that Tenniel was inclined to neglect.
After a while, though, our nerve-endings become raw as one village eccentric after another is being paraded in front of us; and Alice's incessant monologue doesn't help. I defy you to be caught up in the story. It can't be done. To watch this you need to be determined to grimly forge ahead and attend to the images - for they really are memorable images.