In Front of the Rabbit Hole

It must have been around half past ten, or maybe just past three. In any case, the clock on the wall had decided to stop talking to me. In the university’s small screening room, Walt Disney’s 1951 film Alice in Wonderland was playing, while somewhere behind me someone was peeling an orange, and the sound was so loud it seemed as if an entire planet were splitting open. Before the movie started, I’d accepted one of those small, chemically suspicious invitations to expand my consciousness—the kind currently being passed around at student parties. That was perhaps not a scientifically sound way to prepare for a film analysis. On the other hand, for a film in which mushrooms dispense advice, cats vanish, and time stands still at a tea table in a huff, complete sobriety seems almost rude.

Disney’s film runs about 75 minutes and was directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. It premiered on July 26, 1951, in London; two days later, it was released in the United States. The plot is based not only on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland from 1865 but also incorporates characters, poems, and episodes from its 1871 sequel, Through the Looking-Glass.

Yet such straightforward descriptions explain little. On paper, it is an American animated film for families. On the screen, it is something else: a colorful hole in the normal routine, an assault on sensible syntax, and perhaps proof that children’s films can be more dangerous than political leaflets. For Alice does not enter a harmonious fairy-tale world where good and evil are neatly separated. She falls into a society whose rules are constantly changing and whose inhabitants wield authority without being able to express even the slightest rational thought.

The longer I watched, the more Wonderland seemed to me like our university. No one knows exactly what’s happening. Everyone speaks at once. The authorities shout. Exams seem to have already been decided before they’ve even begun. And anyone who asks a simple question is treated as if they had personally insulted the entire institution.

A Plunge into Colors

At the beginning, Alice sits next to her older sister in a green field. Her sister is reading aloud from a history book, but Alice is bored. She dreams of a world of her own, where flowers talk and books consist only of pictures. Already here, the first crack appears in so-called reality. While her sister represents order, lessons, and the past, Alice craves movement, images, and conversation. She doesn’t want a world that is explained. She wants one that responds.

Then the White Rabbit appears. He is wearing clothes, carries a pocket watch, and is in a panic-stricken hurry. Alice follows him and plunges into a rabbit hole that looks less like a hole and more like an endless shaft through the furnishings of human consciousness. Lamps, picture frames, cabinets, and other objects float past her. During this scene, I had the feeling for a few minutes that my movie theater seat was falling too. It was probably firmly in place the whole time. I’m not entirely sure.

Once she reaches the bottom, Alice chases the rabbit through a long room with numerous doors. A talking doorknob tells her she’s too big for the tiny doorway. She then drinks from a bottle, shrinks, notices the key lying on a table, and has to eat a cake to grow back to her normal size. This pattern repeats itself several times in the film: Alice grows big, small, and big again. Her body loses all sense of permanence. Growth here is not a natural process, but an uncontrollable state. The girl can’t even be sure if she’s still the same person she was a few minutes ago.

Her tears eventually flood the room. In this sea of tears, she encounters the Dodo and a group of other animals who are trying to dry off by racing each other without any discernible rules. There’s no real start, no finish line, and in the end, supposedly everyone has won. The whole thing strikes me as a democratic process designed by a drunk bureaucrat.

Later, Alice encounters the twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They tell the story of the walrus and the carpenter, who lure a group of young oysters out of the sea. The walrus speaks in a friendly and solemn tone, only to devour the oysters afterward. The scene seems funny at first, but it has a rather sinister core: The adults talk about walks and pleasant company, while the little ones are already on the menu. The episode originally comes from Through the Looking-Glass and is one of the most striking examples of how the film blends material from both books.

Alice then gets lost in a garden of singing flowers. The flowers initially welcome her warmly, but soon declare her a weed and chase her away. Beauty is portrayed here as a pretentious class system: anyone who doesn’t share the same shape, color, or origin is excluded. Shortly thereafter, a blue caterpillar sits on a mushroom smoking a hookah. Her question, “Who are you?” hits Alice harder than any physical danger. The girl has no answer because her size, her surroundings, and even her memories have become uncertain.

The Cheshire Cat leads her to the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. There, a non-birthday party is taking place. The tea party may have cups, cakes, and rules, but every rule is immediately turned against Alice. Time itself has fallen out with the Hatter, which is why the clock remains stuck at six o’clock. It is always tea time. No one is getting anywhere. At that moment, the scene struck me as the perfect image of a society that considers itself alive, even though it has been repeating the same gestures for years.

Finally, Alice arrives at the Queen of Hearts’ court. The Queen has white roses painted red and threatens everyone with beheading at the slightest deviation. In a game of croquet, flamingos are used as mallets and hedgehogs as balls. Later, a trial takes place in which Alice is to be accused and convicted, even though evidence and sequence of events play no role. When she finally resists, she grows again. The characters of Wonderland pursue her until she sees herself sleeping through the doorknob on the other side of the locked door. She wakes herself up and returns to the river to her sister. According to the official Disney summary, the conflict with the Queen actually ends with her waking up from an increasingly threatening dream.

Curiosities from Wonderland

The film did not come about suddenly. Walt Disney had been working on Alice since the early 1930s. In 1931, he acquired the rights to John Tenniel’s famous illustrations and at one point planned a hybrid of live-action and animation starring Mary Pickford as Alice. After Paramount released its own film adaptation with a star-studded cast in 1933, the project was initially shelved. Later, artist David Hall created designs for a fully animated version. World War II delayed production once again before work began in earnest in the late 1940s.

Alice was voiced by Kathryn Beaumont. She also stood in front of the camera wearing an Alice costume so that the animators could use her movements as a reference. Ed Wynn lent his voice to the Mad Hatter, Jerry Colonna voiced the March Hare, Sterling Holloway voiced the Cheshire Cat, and Verna Felton voiced the Queen of Hearts.

A particularly important influence was the conceptual artist Mary Blair. Her style helped shape Wonderland not as a realistic space, but as a canvas of bold blocks of color, unusual shapes, and almost childlike, simplified perspectives. The plants, mushrooms, and paths do not look as though they could exist anywhere in nature. They appear as if someone had spilled a box of watercolors over the laws of spatial perception. The Victoria and Albert Museum describes the Disney adaptation as one of the most popular animated versions of *Alice*, and highlights Blair’s artistic work.

Musically, too, the film is unusually packed. It contains more songs than any other classic Disney animated film of that era, although some pieces are heard only very briefly. Oliver Wallace’s music was nominated for Best Music in a Musical at the 1952 Academy Awards but lost to An American in Paris.

Two Books, One Film

The biggest difference between Carroll’s books and Disney’s film lies in their structure. The first book follows Alice through the rabbit hole and through various encounters leading up to the trial over the stolen cupcakes. The second begins with her stepping through a mirror and is structured like a game of chess. Disney removes this distinction. Characters and scenes from both works are packed into a single dream.

Tweedledee, Tweedledum, the talking flowers, as well as the Walrus and the Carpenter, for example, belong to Through the Looking-Glass. The White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the Duchess, the tea party, the Cheshire Cat, and the trial, on the other hand, come from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Several major characters from the first book are missing from the film. These include the Duchess, the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle. Disney had originally planned to include the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle but removed them from the final cut. They later appeared in animated commercials for a gelatin product—a fate that would likely have been considered unworthy even in Wonderland.

Carroll’s Alice also strikes me as sharper than Disney’s version. In the book, she is not merely a polite victim of madness. She argues back, passes judgment, gets angry, and recognizes more and more clearly the absurdity of the adult world. Disney makes her gentler, more passive, and more of a spectator. She drifts from one musical number to the next and mainly tries to find her way home.

Carroll’s wordplay, too, can only be partially translated into images and songs. His books deconstruct grammar, meaning, mathematics, school logic, and moral lessons. Disney replaces some of this linguistic complexity with movement, color, and music. That isn’t automatically worse. But it is something different. Carroll makes language go mad; Disney makes the visible world go mad.

This also changes the effect. In the book, uncertainty often arises because a sentence sounds both logical and completely nonsensical at the same time. In the film, it arises because spaces lose their shape, characters transform, and colors almost physically invade the viewer. The literary Wonderland is a machine made of words. The cinematic Wonderland is a jukebox that has exploded and is now running through the forest, singing.

Between Mockery and Awe

Upon its original release, the film was by no means received with universal enthusiasm. British critics and admirers of Carroll, in particular, accused Disney of Americanizing the English classic and replacing its linguistic subtlety with frantic entertainment. In retrospect, the episodic structure is also frequently criticized: the individual scenes possess great energy, but barely coalesce into a continuous plot. The British Film Institute describes the reaction at the time as mixed and sees the film’s loose, episodic structure as a key reason for this.

Walt Disney himself later stated that the film lacked a “heart.” This criticism is interesting. Many other Disney films focus on a clear emotional goal: love, family, a rescue, or a return to a lost homeland. Alice may be homesick, but the inhabitants of Wonderland do not form relationships with her. They appear, perform their acts, and disappear again. No one accompanies her on a lasting basis. Even the Cheshire Cat is more of a floating commentary than a friend. Disney’s own archival account notes that the film was initially a disappointment and that Disney later considered it emotionally lacking.

Yet it is precisely this coldness that makes the film remarkable. Wonderland isn’t there to embrace Alice. It examines her. Every encounter challenges a different certainty: her name, her size, her upbringing, her memory, or her understanding of justice. The film may lack a heart in the usual Disney sense. Instead, it possesses a nervous, flickering brain.

From Flop to Cult Classic

The film’s true second life didn’t begin until years later. While its initial theatrical run was lackluster, Alice in Wonderland was rediscovered in the late 1960s and early 1970s by a young, countercultural audience. Screenings at universities were successful, and Disney re-released the film in theaters in 1974. The official Disney history explicitly states that the “psychedelic generation” rediscovered the film. Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center now describes it as a “proto-psychedelic classic” and points to its success on college campuses in the early 1970s.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen the caterpillar. Mushrooms transform Alice’s body. A cat dissolves into thin air, leaving behind only its grin. Time doesn’t work. Objects have voices. Identity becomes fluid. Authorities are insane. The film didn’t have to be created for the drug scene to be understood by it. It waited for twenty years like a sealed bottle labeled “Drink Me,” until a generation emerged that was foolish or curious enough to pull the cork.

Even before Disney, Alice had been an important figure for surrealists and other artists. In the 1960s, she became an icon of the counterculture. Jefferson Airplane’s song “White Rabbit” openly linked Carroll’s imagery to psychedelic experiences. Posters depicted the Cheshire Cat in garish colors, and artists like Salvador Dalí created their own interpretations of Alice. An exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum documented this connection between Carroll, Surrealism, pop culture, and the counterculture in detail.

Disney’s film provided some of the most enduring images: the blonde Alice in her blue dress, the striped Cheshire Cat, the Hatter with his oversized hat, and the blue caterpillar on its mushroom. These characters were reproduced on posters, clothing, records, and later on countless other items. The Disney version did not replace Carroll’s books, but it did determine how millions of people initially viewed Wonderland.

Furthermore, in 1958, Alice became part of a Disneyland attraction. Kathryn Beaumont returned as the character’s voice. With that, the dream was finally transformed into a walk-in consumer space: one could now buy a ticket, get into a car, and take a mechanical ride through the unconscious. Perhaps that is the ultimate achievement of the modern culture industry. Even madness is given set opening hours.

Awakening Remains Impossible

When the film ended, the theater was once again just a room. The wall was white, the chairs were brown, and the orange behind me had apparently ceased to be a planet. Nevertheless, the normal world no longer seemed entirely credible to me. That is perhaps the greatest achievement of Alice in Wonderland. The film does not present an alternative reality that one can simply leave after 75 minutes. It plants the suspicion that our own world, too, functions according to arbitrary rules.

The Queen is merely a grotesque caricature as long as one has not encountered a real authority that demands punishment before evidence. The Dodo is just a figure of fun as long as you’ve never attended a meeting with no purpose. The tea party is just nonsense as long as you don’t notice how many people repeat the same actions every day and call that life.

As a film adaptation, Disney’s work is unfaithful, abridged, and sometimes overloaded. It transforms Carroll’s linguistic puzzles into music and movement, omits characters, and combines scenes from two books into a wild parade. Yet it is precisely in this chaos that its power lies. The film is not merely the story of a girl who gets lost. It is a colorful exploration of how easily order can turn into nonsense and nonsense into order.

Alice wakes up at the end. The viewer, however, does not quite. Somewhere, the Cheshire Cat lingers in a corner of the mind. You see her smile as soon as a professor explains a simple matter in the most incomprehensible way possible, or a politician delivers the verdict first and the reasons afterward.

So perhaps we are not outside of Wonderland after all. Perhaps we have simply learned to make its inhabitants wear ties.