![]() The mixture of real life and cartooning was a norm in early cartoon filmmaking, as artists played with the new medium and its unprecedented promise of creating impossible scenes. In the first film, a live-action girl, played by child actress Virginia Davis, visits Disney in the studio and enters his magical cartoon world. ‘Alice’s Wonderland,’ which uses methods common to early cartooning, was produced when Disney was still a struggling cartoon filmmaker in Kansas. Kaufman, the similarities between the two pieces of fiction ends there. While Disney’s shorts weren’t directly set in the world of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, but a few references–notably, the fact that the first of the ‘Alice Comedies,’ produced in 1923, was titled ‘Alice’s Wonderland’–make the connection clear. If you’re thinking “girl named Alice” and immediately jumping to a later animated feature by Walt Disney, well, you’re probably on the right track. They also show a young girl engaged in play far more adventurous than what’s shown by later Disney heroines. Their story shows Disney’s development as an artist as well as changing trends in early imagination. The ‘Alice Comedies,’ which merged live actors with animation, were some of Disney’s first animated shorts and some of the first animated shorts to be produced in Hollywood. ![]() In the 1920s, before he was famous, Walt Disney created a series of animated shorts about a young girl and a magical world. The turbulence gets kicked up even more when Alice declares she's not a flower, which drives the others to assume she is "nothing more" than a "common weed." This assumption stirs them into a frenzy, eager to shoo Alice away before she "goes to seed" and spreads "weeds in their bed." How rude! Alice is right when she declares they could "learn a few things about manners." Body-shaming is wrong, as adults know well - even when it comes from plants.Long before Snow White was serenading bluebirds, an Alice dressed in cowboy clothes was beating up bullies. When a sweet-natured baby rosebud remarks that she thinks Alice is pretty, her mother tells her to be quiet while covering her mouth. Did you notice her petals? What a peculiar color!" They then go on to criticize Alice's appearance with rude statements clearly meant to cause her emotional distress over her physical appearance: "Just look at those stems! Rather scrawny, I think. But when she explains she doesn't come from a garden, the cultivated blossoms assume she has more uncouth origins as a wildflower, and their attitudes darken. Likewise, the dream imagery in Alice in Wonderland has not gone unnoticed by academics, and continues to be studied and discussed.Ĭurious about their unexpected guest's origins, they ask Alice what kind of garden she comes from. Carl Jung called these revelatory visions " Big Dreams," and dedicated his life to the study and interpretation of symbolic dream imagery. Dreaming is one way for the unconscious mind to communicate with the conscious mind, particularly when one is undergoing a psychological imbalance that can be harmful to one's well-being - sort of like how a car's check engine light alerts its owner to issues they might otherwise miss. Hidden within the unconscious mind, according to some psychologists and philosophers, are all the unknown aspects of oneself, including repressed urges, fears, traumas, and beliefs. This imagery, and her ensuing fall down the rabbit hole, can be interpreted as symbolizing the unconscious mind, which can only be accessed via dreams, trances, or other similar states. In its reflection appears the White Rabbit, running late as ever. Interestingly, the chosen excerpt is from a chapter examining the rise and fall of the House of Normandy, an era of history rife with noblewomen and princesses named Alice.Īlice's adventures are launched the moment she trails her fingers across the surface of a garden pond. Throughout his life, Carroll was friends with the children of his colleagues, which was actually pretty normal for a Victorian bachelor - but the nature of these friendships and Carroll's sexual identity has long been a hotbed of debate among scholars. This same book was studied by Alice Liddell, one of Carroll's dearest child-friends, and the real-life inspiration for Alice in Wonderland. ![]() Disney's Alice in Wonderland unfolds with Alice's older sister reading her excerpts from some of that history - which Alice complains "doesn't have enough pictures." As it turns out, this scene features quotes from a real-life historical text: Havilland Chepnell's Short Course of History. Childish fancy is plainly apparent in his stories, but they are also laden with subtle hints at more mature subjects, including riddles and numbers games, critical thinking, philosophy, and local history.
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