WILLIAM VERRONE
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) is considered a misstep, a film that loses its child-friendly appeal because of its unusual story and source material. The result is a heady mix of exaggerated, diverse, and bizarre characters that, while likable enough, seemed too “odd” a fit for the Disney name. Disney’s film of Carroll’s allegorical books is somewhat of a departure from the animated films of the Disney canon. Carroll’s books ostensibly are about a child’s perspective of the irrational and nonsensical world of adults, and Alice in Wonderland, the film, eschews Carroll’s (supposed) pointed criticism in order to highlight the wonders of childhood—a “fantasyland” that would come to dominate Disney’s thinking, in terms of his grandiose theme park—as opposed to the more relevant and important themes of dream and imagination. This does not mean the film is completely bad; in fact, its subversive nature and dark humor make it a worthy case study, I believe, of an atypical Disney film. The Disney version plays upon the tropes of “otherness” and power/subjection, which may explain its lasting appeal inasmuch as it is simply another “Disney cartoon for children.” However, Disney did not intend for the film to have these themes. Quite unexpectedly as well, the film was somewhat embraced by the counterculture of the 1960s and gained a new, albeit different, audience in the 1970s, who admired the psychedelic “feel” of the film. I would like to discuss the film and another version, Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1988), a surreal and disturbing version of the Carroll stories. Svankmajer’s Alice is a “re-imagining” and highly uncompromising avant-garde film. It is an astonishing version of Carroll, and addresses relevant issues of childhood perception, imagination, and dream. Although the films differ considerably in this perspective on a child’s insight into her surroundings, they are similar simply and only because the characters in the films are uncanny representations of outsiders. By “outsiders,” I mean a group of characters who are either deliberately shunned by society or choose to avoid the dictates of society. They are like “Others” in this regard, characters that are either willingly or unwillingly apart from society. Alice in Wonderland presents an interesting quandary. The film is not considered to be one of Disney’s best, nor does it receive much general praise. It is eccentric in its structure, which is episodic, and it does not have much to add to Carroll’s books (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland [1865] and Through the Looking-Glass [1871]). In this regard, I would like to discuss the binary nature of the film and what makes it worthy of study: its (inadvertent) theme of Otherness, and the subversive nature of the characters. It has its appeal to children—bright colors, songs, and “weird” creature-characters, but overall, the film lacks depth, and thus seems tiresome and a bit tedious, as opposed to Svankmajer’s Alice. Disney’s film addresses the theme of “otherness,” typically understood as “difference” or “being different from” what might be called the status quo or normality. Alice herself is not unusual; it is all the people and creatures she meets in Wonderland who are different, strange, and eccentric, and therefore set apart from the norm. The film does not heighten this awareness to any lengths, choosing to instead “play it safe” by showcasing or displaying the characters’ oddness itself.
The professed answer to the question posed in my title is, typically, an emphatic “No,” which would be correct. Disney films are not avant-garde in the historical and cultural sense of the idiom, but they do have avant-garde characteristics, particularly in terms of surrealism. The avant-garde is an artistic practice that deliberately seeks alternative forms, styles, and representations of its subject matter. The avant-gardist rejects traditional approaches to literature, film, the visual arts, music—all art forms—in favor of innovation. Avant-garde film advances new techniques, forms of expression, and subject matter, which is the case with Svankmajer’s Alice. Avant-garde films also typically exist outside the “culture industry,” an area where Disney firmly has established itself—and desires to be. Avant-garde filmmakers work in the margins and do not actively seek assurance from the mainstream, unlike Disney. Avant-garde filmmakers are highly independent. Just because Alice in Wonderland has an array of fantastical characters, it does not qualify it as an avant-garde film, but these characters do have certain qualities that can be examined in terms of their relations to the avant-garde. What the film does have is the subversity that is characteristic of some avant-garde films. “Subversiveness” implies a desire to overthrow, overturn, or undermine something, and the avant-garde film attempts these things through style, form, and theme. Or, put another way, to be subversive means to highlight the fallacies of the mainstream, in this case, mainstream films, while showcasing the revolutionary, radical, and groundbreaking forms of the film medium itself. Disney’s Alice in Wonderland has an array of seditious characters who want to undermine authority, if only because they revel in the nonsensical world where they live. They do not necessarily seek assimilation; when Alice arrives in Wonderland, she simply wants to understand or comprehend her surroundings and her newfound predicament rather than becoming fully integrated in the creatures’ world.
Disney films have always showcased a certain amount of diversity, but many of the films themselves, as well as the countless instances of “Disney-ness” that occur in other films or forms of popular culture, could be considered avant-garde because they are deliberately subversive in style, theme, or attitude (like the pink elephants in Dumbo, dancing brooms in Fantasia, and an entire plethora of self-reflexive motifs in more recent films). I would like to discuss the potential for avant-garde characteristics of particular moments in Alice in Wonderland and use Svankmajer’s Alice as a counterpoint as most decidedly avant-garde. Svankmajer’s film may be little seen, but its imagery and narrative is unique and visionary, and is, admittedly, a far better film and interpretation of Carroll than the Disney (or other) versions. Svankmajer’s film has its own sense of “fractured” logic and spatial and temporal dislocation. Given their subject matter, characters, and out of the ordinary locales, Carroll’s books that serve as the basis for each film beg to be filmed as strange, bizarre, and fantastic. But there is a key difference between Disney’s version and Svankmajer’s film: the cartoon world of Disney does not match well with the subject matter; “Carroll is not a kind that translates easily into visual, cartoon form.”1 It is not a children’s book per se, and Svankmajer understands this greatly, which is why he uses an actual girl for Alice and his characteristic stop-motion animation of objects and puppets, which breathes new life into Alice in Wonderland. Everything in his film is alive in three-dimensions, not flat like Disney’s cartoon. Deborah Ross notes the discrepancy between Disney’s finished film and the possibility of a more surrealist film, like Svankmajer’s. She says,
The visuals in fact are rather staid and restrained, mainly literal, representational renderings of the story done in the highly finished, realistic style for which the studio was famous. The fall down the rabbit hole, for example, which marks Alice’s entry into the dream state, might have lent itself to a surrealistic treatment ... but instead it is simply a serial listing in images of the objects Carroll mentions that Alice sees on her way down.2
Svankmajer shows Alice’s descent through a school desk drawer, where Alice then goes down the rabbit hole as if in an antiquated pulley system. It is dark and the clacking of the chains makes the scene nightmarish. All of the objects she sees are reproductions of what was in her room, which will later come to life in Wonderland, and sometimes in menacing ways. Svankmajer’s stop-motion animation, an extremely difficult process that involves moving real three-dimensional objects just slightly and photographing them frame-by-frame before running the finished frames together to create the sensation of movement, is both eerie and appropriate for the world of Carroll.
Disney’s film is structured like a series of episodes of Alice’s adventures, which gives it a halting rhythm, most likely due to the fact that thirteen writers worked on the script (including an uncredited Aldous Huxley!). This possibly explains why there is little cohesion to the story. The film comes across as a series of unrelated, “misadventures of Alice”-style wanderings, which have no real sense of connection. Carroll’s books were tight and cohesive. Carroll never really meant for his books to be taken simply as children’s stories. While appealing to children, they are also satiric and allegorical, while full of logic puzzles, invented words, and general semantic derring-do. Disney alters dialogue and literalizes figurative language so much that the story is less about a child’s view of the world, and more a showcase for the strange characters—and, of course, the disastrous songs. But there is a sense of subversive absurdity to how the characters are depicted.
Alice in Wonderland presents several moments of subversive behavior. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, for instance, are illustrated as precocious and slightly obnoxious schoolboys. They are plump, cowardly, yet oddly affectionate with each other. They tell Alice the story of the Walrus and the Carpenter, which in its own way, dramatizes the nature of violence that permeates much of Carroll’s story, and the fact that we even see nearly ten minutes of them both subverts the overall narrative (e.g., where’s Alice?) and also showcases more subversive characters. Alice leaves them confused; their stories are inconclusive, incomprehensible, and ambiguous (to her), so she moves on to her next episodic encounter. Her encounter with Tweedledum and Tweedledee makes us notice them and not her. Their very strangeness elicits our gaze more than Alice, which occurs throughout the film whenever we meet a new creature-character. Alice is also perplexed by the Caterpillar, who exhales vowels and tosses about nonsensical riddles. The hookah-smoking Caterpillar is an authority figure whose words appear meaningless. One surrealist touch occurs when the Caterpillar does blow smoke. The smoke forms words, such as “[k]not,” a visual pun that indeed reflects the attitude of the surrealist side of the avant-garde (and also suggests why the film was later applauded by the counterculture). Much of the “adult” content of the book (and to some extent the film) stems from the idea that Alice is adrift in a world where very little makes sense because she encounters representations of the adult world. Both Tweedledum and Tweedledee and the Caterpillar are figures that are subversive because they thwart our expectations by talking nonsense. They also detract from the protagonist, Alice. In terms of the avant-garde, subversion was a catalyst for early attempts at surrealist film. The movement itself, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, was focused on overturning the dictates of the bourgeoisie and the fountainheads of art. Filmmakers as diverse as Luis Bunuel or Jean Cocteau applauded the irrationality of dream-worlds and the unconscious. Arguably, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a direct connection to the dream-world. Many avant-garde directors, in fact, used the book as a touchstone for their ideas. Svankmajer greatly admired the book, which is why he wanted to make a film inspired by it. As Peter Hames rightly points out, “Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) provided a text admired by the surrealists and a subject very much in line with Svankmajer’s own concerns—a dialogue with childhood and the child’s world of unrestricted imaginative play.”3 Could this possibly make Disney’s film version also somewhat equivalent to a surrealist dream-state? Perhaps, but Walt himself would not agree.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is about a young child’s imagination, her literal and figurative growth, and the arbitrary rules that govern society. Disney’s Alice in Wonderland is a codified version, intended to be visually striking in order to placate children. Walt Disney, after previewing the film, said, “The film lacks heart,” and, “It is full of weird characters.”4 This sentiment shows his displeasure to the atypical Disney characters in the film. However, it is precisely because the characters in the film are “weird” that it becomes more suggestive of diversity than more recent, contemporary Disney films (which tend to stereotype). To be diverse is to be individualistic; whatever characteristics one has that makes one diverse makes them dissimilar to others, which is not a negative thing. Disney’s characters seem like people who have been (or could have been) ostracized from society because of their diversity, but it seems to me that their strangeness is what makes them appealing. The unending nonsense of the Mad Tea Party is indicative of the kinds of people that showcase subversive behavior, simply because they act routinized, make babbling generalizations, and are, as the Cheshire Cat tells Alice, completely “mad.” The Cheshire Cat’s comment is actually very important because he is telling Alice the truth: everyone in Wonderland is somehow off-kilter, slightly deranged, a little unhinged—and she is thrust among them. It should be noted too that “madness” does not equate with “diversity.” Being “mad” in Wonderland simply means that things do not make sense to an outsider like Alice. Alice’s reply to the Cat is a line direct from Carroll: “But I don’t want to go among mad people.” The Cat’s remark also implies that Alice is the only one in Wonderland who is not mad—she is the only one in Wonderland who is “out of her element.” It is to her credit that she can survive; the Queen’s wild proclamation of “Off with her head!” finally makes Alice realize that she can stop the madness by telling the Queen her order is “nonsense.” She has been the subject of a power domination from her contact with all of the creature-characters in Wonderland. They all exert power over her. Still, by the end, she is timid when it comes to reaching any meaning about her role as the subjugated. It is made much more abundantly clear in Svankmajer’s film that by the end, Alice has learned something and that she is the one with power. In it, Alice begins to see that while her imagination may create such a fantastical world, it also will help her rationalize her experience. In Svankmajer’s Alice, Alice retains control of her environment by the end. When she “awakens,” she finds the old pair of scissors and holds them aloft, saying, “Maybe now I’ll cut off his head,” in reference to the White Rabbit. As Hames says, “It is important to note that the narrative is both imagined and dreamt by Alice and that she remains in control.”5 Disney’s Alice does not indicate exactly how relevant it is that Alice begins to comprehend her surroundings. It is more a fantasy that inspires wonder, but not the imagination. In discussing Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, and particularly the Mad Tea Party and its aftermath, Ross notes,
The storyline ensures that just as [the potential surrealistic] style reaches its climax, Alice is reaching the limits of her fear of imagination. What might have been delightful Daliesque creatures—telephone-ducks, drum-frogs—function rather to frighten the heroine at a point in the plot when she has rejected this “nonsense” and is anxious to get home to write a book about it. Writing a story, she has decided, is much safer than living one.6
In fact, by the end of the Disney film, Alice becomes increasingly passive, signified by her waking up—happy and free at last, rid of the imagination. The power plays that occurred in Wonderland still seem to be disadvantageous to Alice. Instead of questioning her position among them all, she is relegated to the passive “other,” a reversal that highlights the creature-characters’ power, even though they speak irrationalities.
The Mad Tea party is a perfect illustration of the potential for surrealistic imaginings. The tea cups and saucers become alive and flit about the table, much in the same way as the people at the party (except for Alice). They constantly move and multiply, making the scene delirious in its frenetic pacing. It is an avant-garde moment in an otherwise placid film. In comparison, Svankmajer also lets his objects run wild; “His awakening of the stirring in the souls of dormant objects to animate wonderland is Svankmajer’s greatest illusion.”7 In Svankmajer’s version of the Mad Tea Party, there is a kind of organized chaos. The March Hare and Mad Hatter perform their finite rituals of buttering tin can lids and pouring and drinking tea. Svankmajer’s signature rapid and rhythmic editing quickens the pace of the scene. The Mad Hatter speaks in ridiculous riddles and nonsense questions, much like the absent-minded Mad Hatter of Disney (who is not all menacing like Svankmajer’s wooden marionette version). Being absent-minded is not a sign of madness. Still, the very idea of speaking in riddles or of constantly questioning one’s identity, which happens in Disney’s film, can be considered an avant-garde surrealist tendency as well because it thwarts expectations and has the potential for a nonlinear story.
Svankmajer’s film draws heavily upon the nature of dream-worlds, particularly in conjunction with how dream influences reality—a key idea in surrealism. Tina-Louise Reid, for instance, suggests, “With Alice, Jan Svankmajer maintains his uncompromising vision as he explores a world inspired by Carroll’s tales whilst demonstrating the interconnectedness of dream with waking life.”8 Svankmajer accomplishes this by setting the film up as a dream. During the initial credit sequence, Alice, whose mouth is shown in extreme close up whenever she speaks and thus fills the entire frame, tells us, or rather instructs us, “First you must close your eyes, or you won’t see anything.” This directive has two meanings for the spectator: to dream and to use the imagination. Likewise, Frantisek Dryje says, “This paradoxical sentence from the introduction to Svankmajer’s film is an exhortation to dream—to experience something which contains the truth about our lives.”9 After Alice’s instruction, the film begins with a survey of her room; it is full of objects that will eventually reappear in Wonderland (and come to life via Svankmajer’s masterful animation). In noting the importance of these objects, Roger Cardinal says, “One thing seems clear: the treatment of objects within Wonderland corresponds to the fantastical treatment of dream-work.”10 Because the objects come to life in Wonderland, and in often nightmarish ways, it demonstrates Alice’s capacity as an agent of higher imaginative cognition. We get no sense of this in Disney’s version. Instead, Alice, in Disney’s Wonderland, is acted upon to a much greater degree than she acts or interacts; she more often than not responds to people rather than addressing them. The significance of the objects in Alice’s room is that they come alive. According to Reid, “Since children instill toys and other objects with life through animation, childhood serves as a potent setting for Svankmajer’s resurrections, with Carroll’s Wonderland as the most advantageous backdrop.”11 Svankmajer clearly is more attuned to the powers of the imagination than Disney’s disciplined version. In Svankmajer’s film, Alice throws rocks at the creatures, slams the White Rabbit’s hand in a door, and attempts to drown the dormouse. She is not just attempting to maintain control of her environment, but to make sense of it as well, and to shift the power relations among her and the creature-characters.
One important factor concerning the subversive nature of the characters in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, is that they could all be considered “outsiders.” They exhibit personalities that can be considered diverse, meaning they are somehow poles apart from the mainstream. They are all truly outsiders (just as Alice herself could be, since she is displaced from her normal surroundings). The outsider is often constructed or identified from a distance—a distance created solely to situate the outsider as “Other.” Others jeopardize the unity of the community. Strange characters like the March Hare, the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, or even the Queen of Hearts are considered “outsiders” because they are somehow different form societal, cultural, or ideological norms, or are simply too individualistic. All of these outsider characters, though, are perfectly at home in Wonderland. They would never be “at home” anywhere else, but this does not mean their diversity makes them unable to fit in. Rather, in their environment, they are ones who recognize Alice as “diverse”; she becomes the one who does not seem to fit in with her new environment, hence her attempts to control it. Alice’s interaction with them displays playfulness on their part, as well as power positions. But the problem lies in the fact that they embody characteristics of the outsider, which means they are not “kid-friendly” fare the likes of Disney would approve. How can anyone—a child specifically—relate to the creature-characters in Disney’s Wonderland? Did Disney want to promote anarchy, dissidence, or disobedience? No, but even still, Disney should be applauded (however inadvertently), even though the intent on spotlighting the “Other” was not at all Disney’s goal. For instance, while there is some clever wordplay and banter among the characters, the tone certainly is not as aggressive as it should be; it is simply antagonistic, which makes for an easier delineation of Alice (in the “right” or normal) and the others in Wonderland (in the “wrong” or “other”) for children to recognize.
The duality of these characters, as outsiders yet non-aggressively tame, makes Alice in Wonderland an anomaly in the Disney canon. As Sinyard notes, “In his desire to popularize Carroll and perhaps temper his occasional savagery, Disney had succeeded in transforming the malice of Alice into crude vaudeville.”12 Perhaps this explains the unpopularity of the film upon its release. The fact that the anarchic characters wield power over Alice signifies the ironic shift from childhood to adulthood, where Alice should be the one in charge since she is dealing with people who are not as clever as she seems to be. Their subversive nature, as creature-characters who represent Otherness, are antithetical to the fairy-tale characters of Disney’s other films. Fairy-tale characters have a long tradition in folklore, and their appeal is much more straightforward than the literary characters of Alice in Wonderland. Fairy-tale characters are written exclusively for children, which helps explain why Disney has always used them as templates for their successful films. What makes Alice in Wonderland unusual, then, is the fact that the characters are drawn from a source that does not translate well into the world of the Disney cartoon.
Svankmajer’s Alice is an adult film, meant to reflect the importance of connecting with childhood dreams. Because Alice narrates the story Svankmajer allows her to create Wonderland herself. Whenever someone speaks in the film, which is rare, Alice’s mouth appears in close-up, saying things like, “...sighed the White Rabbit,” or “...cried the Mad Hatter,” or even, “...Alice thought to herself.” Svankmajer’s vision of the child’s descent into Wonderland is definitely dark, so it refuses to settle on a Disney-esque style that could render it too civilized. Svankmajer tries to make the visually absurd, irrational equivalent of Carroll’s books. Svankmajer himself said, “Alice as I filmed it and how, of course, Lewis Carroll conceived it on paper, is an infantile dream. I strictly adhered to its ‘logic’ when making the film.”13 Svankmajer takes liberties with the source, but he is not so much interested in fidelity than he is the tone, atmosphere, and character of Carroll’s stories. He is more interested in depicting the way a child’s dream can alter or enhance or influence her immediate, waking life. According to Reid, “Svankmajer engages in a dialogue with dream rather than losing himself in a fantasyland,”14 which would put him at odds with Disney. Surrealism, in general, is concerned with irrationality, the unconscious, and liberation. Svankmajer’s puppets, which he uses in almost all of his films, also suggest a close affinity with childhood imagination. The puppets come to life through animation, but a child’s toy comes to life through the imagination. “Svankmajer’s use of puppets steeps Alice in the realm of magic extending from Carroll, a source rich in irrationality, a quality that exists in magic ritual, dream and child’s play,”15 which also elicits dreams of childhood from the spectator. Svankmajer wants the audience to think about the importance of dream and memory and feel the textures of his animated objects, which, because they are done in striking stop-motion animation, do feel alive. By the end of Disney’s version, by contrast, one feels slightly cheated. Ross even says, “All elements [in the film] combine to entrap the unwary viewer: to entice her to fantasize—even to pay money for the privilege—and then to make her feel, like Alice, guilty and ashamed.”16 Indeed, Disney has made the experience less than appetizing.
The stress on childhood really comes from the power to dream and then to realize these dreams—even when they are nightmares. Svankmajer’s Alice structures itself as a dream, but it is ambiguous as to whether or not it really is a dream, since at the end, Alice sees that the White Rabbit is still missing from its glass enclosure. Since it is gone, we are not quite sure if Alice imagined or dreamt her time in Wonderland. Hames correctly notes, “At the end of Alice, when returned to the nursery with all her toys and fantasies apparently in place, Alice finds that the White Rabbit is missing—evidence for the reality of her adventures.”17 Memories that derive from dreams also help structure our understanding of the present, which was one of the key ideas in Carroll’s books. Dreams can be a place of childlike innocence, nightmare, or a combination of the two. Alice’s innocence is compromised to a certain extent once she enters Svankmajer’s Wonderland, which becomes more of a nightmarish world where she must use her wits to survive.
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland provides a perfect opportunity to consider how Alice’s adventures may influence her waking life, but alas, Alice awakens as innocent as before, none the worse for her strange encounters. It is only the perceptive spectator who notices the irony of her encounters with the outsider—as an outsider herself—that can change her. As Deborah Ross suggest, by the end of the film, Alice is at “The center of a self-lacerating musical lament in which [she] abandons for good her fantasy of excitement and power to dwindle into a tiny, forlorn figure in the center of a large, dark frame.” She adds, “In the end of the movie, the defiance and assertiveness of the line, ‘You’re only a pack of cards,’ are lost.”18 Again, Disney’s focus is more on the happiness of children instead of showing the reality of childhood, where dream and imagination help create and sustain memory and remembrance. The outsider characters never directly address these issues, and while we may recognize them, it would be blasphemous for Disney to address them head on. We are left with our own recognition of the outsider characters, who may be a bit annoying, but nevertheless are representative of the subversive nature of the avant-garde. They all could be read as manifestations of unconscious states, particularly those of childhood and the memories that shape one’s cognition and emotional and physical self. If only Disney recognized this, the potential could have been enormous.
The many creatures in Svankmajer’s Alice are also distinguished by their “otherness.” Their diversity stems from their odd construction. For example, the animals that assist the White Rabbit as he tries to capture Alice are made of skeletons. As Will Brooker notes, “The representation of the Rabbit and his skeletal crew—a vicious canine and a team of ill-assembled skeletons, clacking their limbs as they drag mismatched tails behind toothy skulls—only emphasizes the sadism and violence present in the original story.”19 Disney completely dissolves the violence (even though Alice is subjected to some sadistic events, particularly at the end when she runs away from all of the menacing characters she has encountered in Wonderland). Svankmajer’s object animation emphasizes how it can change the parameters of the everyday, destabilize our accepted ideas of reality, and challenge the conventional understanding of our existence. This is why Alice questions her surroundings in Wonderland. Svankmajer has said that he believes inanimate objects have their own lives and that it is part of his filmmaking process to bring their stories out for others to see and hear, and also for his characters to interact with the objects’ tangible qualities. In Alice, for example, tools, rocks, scissors, buttons, socks, and leaves all become animate and interact with Alice-as-human and Alice-as-doll (itself an animated object). (Whenever Alice eats the cookie and shrinks, she becomes a doll, which Svankmajer animates brilliantly.) Svankmajer’s understanding of animation and his method of evoking moods and themes is quite different from Disney. Svankmajer has also made clear his dissatisfaction with the way Disney animation is corruptive. When asked in an interview what he thinks about Disney, Svankmajer gave an eloquent, spirited reply:
Disney is among the greatest makers of “art for children.” I have always held the view that no special art for children simply exists, and what passes for it embodies either the birch or lucre. “Art for children” is dangerous in that it shares either in the domestication of the child’s soul (“educational art” = the birch) or the bringing up of consumers of mass culture (Disney). I am afraid that a child reared on the current produce of Disney will find it difficult to get used to more sophisticated and demanding kinds of art, and will easily assume his/her place in the ranks of viewers of idiotic TV serials.20
Clearly, Svankmajer’s take on Disney’s world of animated films is in high contrast to what he believes animation should and can accomplish. His animation reveals the mysterious personalities existent in dormant objects. This is entirely an avant-garde motif. As Svankmajer puts it, “I use real animation for mystification, for disturbing the utilitarian habits of the audience, to unsettle them, or for subversive purposes.”21 One thing Svankmajer does have in common with Disney, and especially with Alice in Wonderland, is the portrayal of the abnormal characters. The unusual characters of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland exhibit “difference” in their attitudes toward Alice. Outsiders are usually used in literature or film to shed light on ideological issues such as diversity. In this way, they are meant to instruct us about ourselves, since we, the spectators in this case, are given the subjective perspective of viewing the outsiders of Alice in Wonderland from a “safe” environment. Disney, at least, presents them in such a way that makes the fact that they are outsiders relatively normal and acceptable in the world of Wonderland. In other words, being an outsider is tolerable; it is the rest of us—or society—that needs to be more accepting. To some extent, Alice learns this lesson during her adventures, even though the way Disney presents the characters is outlandish, for example, one of buffoonery (the White Rabbit) or forgetfulness (the Mad Hatter) or temperament (the Queen). Alice is constantly ordered by the characters to identify herself. Alice’s identity is somewhat in crisis; the constant harangues of the people and critters she meets are meant to strengthen her own subjective perception of herself, and at the same time, provoking her into contemplation of larger issues of diversity.
That said, Disney’s version does not overtly mention any of these themes, nor does it aspire to, which is why Alice does not learn from her adventures. As Sinyard notes, “Perhaps the structure is a little too meandering to engage a child’s attention all the time ... one admires its cleverness, but its situations fail to move one.”22 But examining the film closely reveals that whether intentional or not, Alice in Wonderland is not so much about a girl’s adventures than they are about a girl’s maturation. Again, Disney does not offer this idea straightforwardly. The setting of Wonderland is symbolic; it is a reflection of the adult world, and therefore a “realistic” world. Wonderland, as depicted in Disney’s film, is temporally and physically altered; animals speak (and remain sexless or asexual); people are disproportionate (Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Red Queen); or Alice herself becomes smaller or larger, making objects or the natural world uneven. She tries to maneuver her way through the world according to irrationality. However, after she flees all of the menacing creatures of her dream-world, she wakes up, and thus is “saved.”
The spaces of Svankmajer’s Wonderland are claustrophobic, dark, and menacing. Alice’s room is the same way—full of intricate and odd objects that create the threatening tone to the film. The confined space of her bedroom becomes the place for Wonderland. It is not a fantasy world of open skies and wooded passages like what we see in Disney. Disney’s film does have “darker” colors in some scenes, but the brightly-hued Alice never seems in real threat. In contrast, in one horrific scene in Svankmajer’s Alice, the skeletal creatures set upon her. The creatures hunt her down and cause her to fall into a pot full of milky-colored water. This graphic scene is Svankmajer’s own imaginative way of rendering the violence in Carroll’s text in an uncompromising way: in it, the animals hit Alice’s face with small stones and the Pigeon “beats her violently with its wings.”23 Svankmajer’s Alice is not an innocent victim adrift in a foreign world of typical Disney cutesy characters. Svankmajer recognizes the connection between the objects’ world and that of Alice’s world. According to Dryje, “The need for aggression, aimed at a certain object, and the need for its adoration are balanced, and this has a certain cathartic effect. The same principal provides the foundation for the emotional (and informational) blueprint of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventure sin Wonderland.”24
In Alice, Svankmajer retells Carroll’s stories in his own way. The original stories of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass have encouraged many artists and readers alike to use the imagination as a source of inspiration. As Reid suggests, “The transportation to other nonsensical realms not unlike our own has prompted many artists to filter Wonderland through their own sensibilities.”25 Svankmajer’s allegiance to surrealism makes his film avant-garde. According to Chris Jenks,
Where centuries of classical philosophy, also in pursuit of the truth, had essentially recommended that we “should not let our imaginations run away with us,” the Surrealists demanded that we should. Thus imagination (untrustworthy), the unconscious (inarticulate), and desire (unspoken), should now become trustworthy, articulate, and find voice, they should combine as out new mode of cognition and break out from the moral constraints that contemporary classifications of experience have placed upon us.26
Svankmajer’s Alice precisely and deliberately delves into the imagination, the unconscious, and desire, and therefore reflects the avant-garde tendencies of tying dreams to everyday awareness. It is important to also realize that “The dream does not rule over reality, nor reality over the dream; their relationship is dialectical.”27 Thus, in Svankmajer’s Alice, there is an ongoing investigation of the relationship that the imagination and the dream-world has over normal cognition. The closest Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (perhaps) comes to this acknowledgement is in its (mis)appropriation as a “drug” movie in the 1970s. Several critics have noted that the film does seem more appropriate to a drug-induced “trip” (a la Alice’s “adventures”) than other Alice adaptations. Brooker, for instance, writes, “It is Disney’s psychedelically multicolored Alice that seems most blatantly to invite the reading of Carroll’s story as a drug hallucination.”28 If so, it is the only way the film could be mind-expansive on any sort of level. Svankmajer, by contrast, approaches the material in a different way. Reid suggests, “By constructing Wonderland from the recognizable materials of reality and dream, Svankmajer removes the psychedelic reading from Carroll that has been such an easy lapse for other artists.”29 Disney certainly had no intention of making a countercultural film, but the point is that Disney’s film could potentially have ties to the workings of dream-states if we want to include the analogy of mind-altering with the avant-garde. It is a stretch, but there again, part of the surrealist wing of the avant-garde was a focus on the expansion of perception via dreams and the unconscious. Disney’s diverse array of out of the ordinary characters also helps this argument—if one chooses to follow it.
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland is not so much an adaptation as it is a dismantling of Carroll’s books. This Americanization of Alice, as it were, reeks of popular culture, vaudeville, and sameness, a slight numbing effect that strips the original text of its wonders. Whereas Svankmajer relies upon his own aesthetic to adapt Carroll’s ideas of dream and imagination more adequately, “Disney clearly distinguishes Wonderland as fantasy. It promotes Alice as innocent family fun, but cleans up the text, replacing the creatures’ rudeness with zaniness, and their wordplay with music-hall pratfalls.”30 Still, should we care at all that Disney has altered the original so much that it becomes sanitized? Shouldn’t Alice in Wonderland simply be fodder for children, meant to make them laugh as opposed to making them think? After all, “Disney’s films offer children opportunities to locate themselves in a world that resonates with their desires and interests.”31 The debate is central to understanding the cultural merit of a film like Alice in Wonderland; because the characters in it are so different, we have to investigate their alternativeness.
Disney’s undeniably influential animation and consumer-oriented product has predisposed audiences to “lose” themselves in their wondrous worlds. Children are especially appreciative of (susceptible to?) the magic of Disney’s entertainment. By resisting the industry standard toward making films for a mature audience, Disney has established itself as a niche player and cornered the market on a loyal demographic. As Henry Giroux notes, “The boundaries between entertainment, education, and commercialization collapse through Disney’s sheer reach into everyday life.”32 There will always be new generations who will grow up on Disney and those who are grown up and will return to Disney. Their films are good for “teachable moments,” even when, as with the case of Alice in Wonderland, the messages in the film are not overly transparent.
Svankmajer’s film allows us to recognize the importance of the everyday in our shaping of how we understand the significance of our imagination—to see, that is, how objects interact with themselves and with us when we choose to imagine it. The mundane can become magical. It is a powerful and vital message; what Svankmajer’s Alice teaches us is how the visions of childhood can commingle with those of the adult world once memory is enacted. Disney’s Alice in Wonderland prevents the possibility of tapping into the power of memory, simply because the film showcases exciting activity and exploration without linking the use of imagination to dream. According to Giroux, Disney “polices” its products: “The policing of memory erases the emancipatory possibilities of memory.”33 If this is the case, then Alice in Wonderland merely becomes nothing more than a “Disney cartoon for children.”
1. Neil Sinyard, The Best of Disney (New York: Portland House, 1988), 70.
2. Deborah Ross, “Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination,” Marvels and Tales 18.1 (2004): 58.
3. Peter Hames, “The Core of Reality: Puppets in the Feature Films of Jan Svankmajer,” in The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 88.
4. Sinyard, The Best of Disney, 70.
5. Hames, “The Core of Reality,” 88.
6. Ross, “Escape from Wonderland,” 58.
7. Tina-Louise Reid, “Alice,” in The Cinema of Central Europe, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 218.
8. Ibid, 215.
9. Frantisek Dryje, “The Force of Imagination,” in The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 156.
10. Roger Cardinal, “Thinking Through Things: The Presence of Objects in the Early Films of Jan Svankmajer,” in The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 75.
11. Reid, “Alice,” 217.
12. Sinyard, The Best of Disney, 75.
13. Peter Hames, “Interview with Jan Svankmajer,” in The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy, ed. Peter Hames (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), 114.
14. Reid, “Alice,” 218.
15. Ibid, 223.
16. Ross, “Escape from Wonderland,” 58.
17. Hames, “The Core of Reality,” 98–99.
18. Ross, “Escape from Wonderland,” 57.
19. Will Brooker, Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004), 216.
20. Hames, “Interview with Jan Svankmajer,” 134.
21. Ibid, 120.
22. Sinyard, The Best of Disney, 75.
23. Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (London: Penguin, 1865), 65.
24. Dryje, “The Force of Imagination,” 174.
25. Reid, “Alice,” 215.
26. Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003), 154.
27. Dryje, “The Force of Imagination,” 155.
28. Brooker, Alice’s Adventures, 217.
29. Reid, “Alice,” 218.
30. Brooker, Alice’s Adventures, 218.
31. Henry A. Giroux, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 91.
32. Ibid, 89.
33. Ibid, 129.
Brooker, Will. Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. New York: Continuum, 2004.
Cardinal, Roger. “Thinking Through Things: The Presence of Objects in the Early Films of Jan Svankmajer.” In The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy, edited by Peter Hames, 67–82. London: Wallflower Press, 2008.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Penguin, 1865.
Dryje, Frantisek. “The Force of Imagination.” In The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy, edited by Peter Hames, 143–203. London: Wallflower Press, 2008.
Giroux, Henry A. The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.
Hames, Peter. “The Core of Reality: Puppets in the Feature Films of Jan Svankmajer.” In The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy, edited by Peter Hames, 83–103. London: Wallflower Press, 2008.
Hames, Peter. “Interview with Jan Svankmajer.” In The Cinema of Jan Svankmajer: Dark Alchemy, edited by Peter Hames, 104–139. London: Wallflower Press, 2008.
Jenks, Chris. Transgression. London: Routledge, 2003.
Reid, Tina-Louise. “Alice.” In The Cinema of Central Europe, edited by Peter Hames, 215–223. London: Wallflower Press, 2004.
Ross, Deborah. “Escape from Wonderland: Disney and the Female Imagination.” Marvels and Tales 18.1 (2004): 53–66.
Sinyard, Neil. The Best of Disney. New York: Portland House, 1988.