Alice in Wonderland — books and films

Lewis Carroll’s books, ”Alice’s ad­ven­tures in Won­der­land” and ”Alice through the look­ing glass”, have been re­peatedly ad­ap­ted for the screen over the last cen­tury. Even if they are an­im­a­tions or films, these ad­apt­a­tions are still very pop­u­lar among both chil­dren and adults. As the au­thor him­self took into con­sid­er­a­tion the re­sponse re­ceived from chil­dren in the pro­cess of writ­ing his first book, (Leach, 1999) one could as­sume he would have ap­pre­ci­ated the idea of hav­ing his stor­ies re­writ­ten and ad­ap­ted for every new generation. 

This com­par­at­ive ana­lysis is try­ing to il­lus­trate the way in which the res­ult of Lewis Carroll’s ima­gin­a­tion was used in three dif­fer­ent ad­apt­a­tions. The first is Disney’s an­im­ated film Alice in Won­der­land from 1951, which com­bines char­ac­ters and situ­ations from both books, and is one of the best known visual rep­res­ent­a­tions of Alice’s world. Two more re­cent ad­apt­a­tions were dir­ec­ted in 2010 (Alice in Won­der­land) and pro­duced in 2016 (Alice through the look­ing glass) by Tim Bur­ton, of­fer­ing a new fresh per­spect­ive upon the char­ac­ters and their in­ter­ac­tion. The ana­lysis fo­cuses on the ways in which these three films visu­ally il­lus­trate and cla­rify some of the puzz­ling situ­ations from the books or drastic­ally change and ad­apt the ori­ginal ideas, in­tro­du­cing more am­bigu­ous elements. 

The books

It is a well known fact that the in­spir­a­tion for Alice’s ad­ven­tures lies with Carroll’s con­nec­tion with the fam­ily of Henry Lid­dell, es­pe­cially with the young girls Lor­ina, Edith and Alice. How­ever, the au­thor denied hav­ing based his char­ac­ter on a par­tic­u­lar child (Co­hen, 1979), even if he ded­ic­ated his first ma­nu­script to Alice Lid­dell: ”A Christ­mas gift to a dear child in memory of a sum­mer day” (Car­roll, 1864, first cover). On one of their row­ing trips from 1862 he told the chil­dren the first ver­sion of the story of Alice in Won­der­land and in 1864 gave the ma­nu­script to­gether with hand-made il­lus­tra­tions to Alice, en­titled Alice’s Ad­ven­tures Un­der Ground (Leach, 1999).

Lewis Car­roll even­tu­ally pub­lished his story with the title Alice’s Ad­ven­tures in Won­der­land in 1865 and con­tin­ued Alice’s ad­ven­tures with Through the Look­ing Glass in 1871 (Car­roll, 1993). Both books seem to fol­low the lo­gic of a child’s ima­gin­a­tion in a non­sensical world where one can enter through rab­bit holes and mir­rors, where an­im­als talk and char­ac­ters of nurs­ery rhymes come to life, cats dis­ap­pear and Alice her­self con­stantly changes height by eat­ing and drink­ing from la­belled con­tain­ers. Carroll’s work has been con­sidered as highly ima­gin­at­ive and cre­at­ive be­cause it in­cludes sur­pris­ing word­plays, unique char­ac­ters and fant­astic as­so­ci­ations of im­ages and ideas and it ap­peals both to chil­dren and adults by us­ing nurs­ery rhymes and polit­ical al­lu­sions, math­em­at­ical and lo­gical riddles and ex­ist­en­tial ques­tions. Fur­ther­more, it is con­sidered that his books made the non­sense lit­er­at­ure renowned world­wide and pre­figured fantasy nov­els (Mal­com, 1997).

Alice’s Ad­ven­tures in Won­der­land, pub­lished in 1865, deals with sev­eral very power­ful themes, one which emerges through­out the text be­ing the ques­tion of iden­tity. As Alice con­stantly changes size, her per­cep­tion of her­self be­comes con­fused and in her meet­ing the Cater­pil­lar the an­swer to the ques­tion “Who are you?” al­ludes to a child’s chan­ging per­cep­tion of iden­tity when grow­ing up: “I–I hardly know, sir, just at present– at least I know who I was when I got up this morn­ing, but I think I must have been changed sev­eral times since then.” (Car­roll, 1993, p. 69).

Mad­ness, non­sense and ima­gin­a­tion are other three im­port­ant ele­ments in the book which func­tion in­ter­de­pend­ently in build­ing a world which op­er­ates on re­versed lo­gic or without any lo­gic at all, in­dic­at­ing the char­ac­ters be­ing mad. How­ever, mad­ness seems re­l­at­ive when us­ing one’s ima­gin­a­tion as there are no lim­its in lo­gic and com­mon sense when ima­gin­a­tion is set free. At the be­gin­ning, Alice res­ists the lack of lo­gic from Won­der­land, but the dia­logue with the Cheshire cat in­dic­ates that her pres­ence there is ac­tu­ally the res­ult of us­ing ima­gin­a­tion and, there­fore, trans­gress­ing the lim­its of lo­gic and nor­mal­ity (this could be a ref­er­ence to Car­roll, as an au­thor, or to Alice, as a trav­el­ler between worlds): “‘But I don’t want to go among mad people,’ Alice re­marked. ‘Oh, you can’t help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.’ ‘How do you know I’m mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn’t have come here.”’ (Car­roll, 1993, p. 87).

Alice through the look­ing glass, and what Alice found there was pub­lished in 1871 as a se­quel present­ing Alice re­turn­ing to Won­der­land through a mir­ror. Be­sides the re­versed lo­gic of things that func­tion in this world ac­cord­ing to the prin­ciple of re­flec­tions in mir­rors, the mo­tif of the mir­ror as a re­flect­ing sur­face in­tro­duces the ex­ist­en­tial idea of en­ter­ing in­side one’s own mind, as the re­flec­tion shows the per­son look­ing at it. In ad­di­tion to this, by step­ping through the look­ing glass, Alice pre­dicts the nu­mer­ous cross­ings to par­al­lel or alien worlds through portals that have been ma­ter­i­al­ising into re­flect­ing sur­faces (wa­ter, wa­tery sub­stances, glass, mir­ror etc.) through­out the his­tory of sci­ence-fic­tion ever since.

Disney’s animated adaptation

An­other lit­er­ary theme that would be de­veloped by the book ad­apt­a­tions is the im­possible, a concept con­nec­ted to ima­gin­a­tion and be­lief:  “Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use try­ing,’ she said: ‘one can’t be­lieve im­possible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much prac­tice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I al­ways did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, some­times I’ve be­lieved as many as six im­possible things be­fore break­fast.’” (Car­roll, 1993, p. 201–202). Be­liev­ing is what makes Alice and the uni­corn real for one an­other as child and uni­corn both ap­pear as fab­ulous creatures in the other’s per­cep­tion: “‘Well, now that we have seen each other,’ said the Uni­corn, ‘if you’ll be­lieve in me, I’ll be­lieve in you.’” (Car­roll, 1993, p. 237).

In 1951 Walt Dis­ney re­leased the well-known an­im­ated ad­apt­a­tion of the two books writ­ten by Lewis Car­roll, after al­most two dec­ades in which he had ex­per­i­mented with vari­ous ways of ad­apt­a­tion. Without a very en­thu­si­astic audi­ence, Dis­ney him­self was not very fond of the film and it was only in 1974 when his com­pany re-re­leased it that the film was fi­nally a suc­cess, as it was in tune with the psy­che­delic times (Alice in Won­der­land: 60th An­niversary Edi­tion, 2011). As the script fo­cused on the com­edy of the dia­logues, this ad­apt­a­tion em­phas­ised the whim­sical side of Car­roll’s books. Dis­ney also wanted to in­clude Car­roll’s verses, there­fore, he in­cluded most of the 30 songs writ­ten es­pe­cially for the film, mak­ing it the Dis­ney film with the greatest num­ber of songs (Alice in Won­der­land: 60th An­niversary Edi­tion, 2011). This has made the char­ac­ters even more mem­or­able for its audience.

One of the most im­port­ant songs in the an­im­ated film is the one Alice sings be­fore fol­low­ing the white rab­bit, en­titled “In a world of my own”, and it em­phas­ises one of the main themes of the books, the non­sensical char­ac­ter of a world cre­ated by ima­gin­a­tion. How­ever, the an­im­ated Alice wishes for and em­braces non­sense and mad­ness as a way of chas­ing away the bore­dom of real­ity in con­trast to the Alice found in the books: ”If I had a world of my own, everything would be non­sense”, Alice says (Alice in Won­der­land, 1951, min. 1:15–1:20).

Fa­cing most of the in­triguing situ­ations and char­ac­ters from the ori­ginal stor­ies, Alice searches for her way through Won­der­land in the same con­fus­ing man­ner and is con­fron­ted with the same ques­tion of iden­tity asked by the Cater­pil­lar. Col­our­ful and mu­sical, funny and ima­gin­at­ive, the Dis­ney ad­apt­a­tion play­fully com­bines the two books in a unit­ary whole, mak­ing it ap­peal­ing to chil­dren and adults as an en­ter­tain­ing ex­per­i­ence, re­du­cing polit­ical al­lu­sions and ex­ist­en­tial ques­tions to a minimum. 

Tim Burton’s adaptations

In 1933 Para­mount stu­dios re­leased Alice in Won­der­land as a live ac­tion film ad­apt­ing both books, one year after the 100^th an­niversary of Lewis Carroll’s birth. This re­mained one of the ma­jor live ac­tion films pro­duced in Hol­ly­wood to dir­ectly ad­apt the ori­ginal stor­ies un­til 2010 when Tim Bur­ton dir­ec­ted Alice in Won­der­land as a se­quel to the ori­ginal story (Bur­ton, Alice in Won­der­land, 2010). How­ever, many other ad­apt­a­tions ex­ist de­signed as TV film series or as ac­tion films pro­duced by other film com­pan­ies around the world, giv­ing closely-re­lated or very dif­fer­ent in­ter­pret­a­tions of the story.

Tim Burton’s ad­apt­a­tion from 2010 was also re­leased by the Dis­ney stu­dios. How­ever, even if it re­unites most of the char­ac­ters from both books, Alice in Won­der­land is a film which con­tin­ues the story of the young Alice by in­tro­du­cing a grown-up char­ac­ter. She re­turns to Won­der­land in or­der to ful­fil the pre­destined task of killing the hor­rible mon­ster Jab­ber­wocky. The whole film is con­struc­ted around the Jab­ber­wocky poem from the book Through the look­ing glass (Car­roll, 1993, p. 167–169) which also in­dic­ates the name of the con­front­a­tion day, “frab­jous day”, and the name of the sword destined to slay the mon­ster, “the vorpal blade”. If in the book the poem ap­pears as an ab­surd and non­sensical piece of writ­ing, the film ad­apt­a­tion gives it the au­thor­ity of a fac­tual, proph­etic document.

The real­ity the grown-up Alice leaves be­hind when fol­low­ing the white rab­bit is one in which she lives only with her mother and their fin­an­cial prob­lems force her to marry a very un­pleas­ant suitor. Memor­ies of her child­hood in­dic­ate her first trip to Won­der­land as a re­cur­ring night­mare which leads her to think she might be mad. Her ad­ven­tur­ous father en­cour­ages her by telling her that all the best people are mad, sug­gest­ing a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive on mad­ness and how it is re­l­at­ive to real­ity and per­cep­tion. Fur­ther­more, when present­ing his ideas of trav­el­ling to China to his in­vestors, their alarmed per­cep­tion of the im­possible plan is con­fron­ted by him say­ing that he some­times thinks about at least six im­possible things be­fore break­fast (an idea ori­gin­ally ex­pressed by the Red Queen in Car­roll, 1993, p. 210–211).

Thus, the film ad­apt­a­tion acts both as a se­quel and a pre­cursor of the books, mak­ing con­nec­tions between Won­der­land and the real world which were not present in the ori­ginal story and which add new sig­ni­fic­ances to the themes of the im­possible and mad­ness. Through­out his­tory all vis­ion­ary plans were first con­sidered im­possible and, ori­ginal, out-of-the-box think­ing was gen­er­ally con­sidered mad­ness, un­til proven otherwise.

 Be­liev­ing in im­possible things is what gives the grown-up Alice the cour­age to face and kill the Jab­ber­wocky, mak­ing this act of cour­age a mo­tiv­at­ing start­ing point to change her life in the real world, re­fus­ing any mar­riage pro­pos­als and set­ting sail as a fe­male cap­tain to ex­plore the seas and fol­low her late father’s dream. Thus, Tim Burton’s ad­apt­a­tion high­lights other prob­lems faced by young wo­men in the Vic­torian era, like self-de­term­in­a­tion and fin­an­cial in­de­pend­ence, which were, at the time, seen as im­possible concepts. 

In this re­spect the prob­lem of iden­tity be­comes ex­tens­ively de­veloped through­out the 2010 film, as even from her ar­rival in Won­der­land all the char­ac­ters doubt her be­ing the Alice that came there as a young child and she is con­stantly con­fron­ted with an iden­tity she needs to dis­cover and ac­cept as her own. Even the con­ver­sa­tion with the cater­pil­lar takes a dif­fer­ent form: “‘Who are you?’ ‘Alice.’ ‘We shall see.’ ‘What do you mean by that? I ought to know who I am!’ ‘Yes, you ought, stu­pid girl!’” (Alice in Won­der­land, 2010, min. 20:35–20:45)

Liv­ing as a grown-up wo­man in the real world seems to have made Alice for­get her abil­ity to be­lieve in an ima­gin­ary, non­sensical world where the im­possible only has to be be­lieved in to be­come pos­sible. There­fore, the White Queen, the Mad Hat­ter, Tweedledee and Tweedle­dum and the March Hare, all doubt her iden­tity un­til she fi­nally ac­cepts that she is the one who can ful­fil the proph­ecy of killing the Red Queen’s mon­ster. The prob­lem of iden­tity be­comes a mat­ter of ac­know­ledging one’s true nature, de­fy­ing so­ci­ety ex­pect­a­tions and be­liev­ing in one­self bey­ond the lim­it­a­tions of what is con­sidered possible.

Alice through the look­ing glass, pro­duced by Tim Bur­ton in 2016, goes even fur­ther from the in­flu­ence of the cor­res­pond­ing book in cre­at­ing an en­tirely dif­fer­ent series of events. Some of the ele­ments pre­served from the ori­ginal story are the passing through the mir­ror into Won­der­land and the pres­ence of some of the char­ac­ters, like Humpty Dumpty. How­ever, the or­der and lo­gic of things is no longer re­versed and Alice be­gins a jour­ney to meet Time, a very ser­i­ous char­ac­ter, steal his chro­no­sphere and travel back in time to save the Hatter’s family.

This film ad­apt­a­tion is de­signed as a se­quel but also acts as a pre­quel in the or­der of events as the Hat­ter and the March Hare are trapped by Time al­ways a minute be­fore tea time un­til the young Alice joins their party. One also dis­cov­ers the reason why the Red Queen has be­come so cruel and venge­ful against her sis­ter, the White Queen, when Alice travels back to their child­hood years. Be­sides the ori­ginal plot us­ing fantasy ele­ments like time travel, time ma­chines, per­son­i­fic­a­tions of ab­stract no­tions like time, Tim Bur­ton also con­tin­ues the tra­di­tion of Lewis Carroll’s work by in­tro­du­cing new hu­mor­ous word­plays re­fer­ring to time: “‘Cheshire, where have you been? You’re late!’ ‘On the con­trary, I’m right on Time.’” (The Cheshire cat lean­ing on Time’s shoulders in Alice through the look­ing glass, 2016, min. 59:30–59:40 ).

Conclusions

When con­sid­er­ing the dif­fer­ences between books and film ad­apt­a­tions, one must bear in mind the fact that a book is the product of one author’s ima­gin­a­tion, some­times in­clud­ing il­lus­tra­tions made by an­other per­son. On the other hand, an­im­a­tions and films are the res­ult of many people’s work, com­bin­ing dif­fer­ent vis­ions and us­ing other ways of con­vey­ing mean­ing, like mu­sic, mo­tion, col­our and sound. In this re­spect, an an­im­ated ad­apt­a­tion like Disney’s film from 1951 ad­ded a more ro­man­ti­cised im­age to Won­der­land and made an im­press­ive im­pact on people’s memory through songs and col­our­ful char­ac­ters. How­ever, it ac­ted as a sim­pli­fied ver­sion of the ori­ginal two stor­ies pre­serving only some of the char­ac­ters and situ­ations from Through the look­ing glass and paid little at­ten­tion to ser­i­ous, ex­ist­en­tial or polit­ical problems. 

Tim Burton’s ad­apt­a­tions used the ori­ginal stor­ies as start­ing points in cre­at­ing a new world with a dif­fer­ent plot de­vel­op­ment which is more in­ter­est­ing for the con­tem­por­ary viewer and cre­ates time and cause-ef­fect con­nec­tions between the ori­ginal books and their film ver­sions. The story has been trans­formed into a fantasy with mod­ern sig­ni­fic­ance for real­ity as it ques­tions the role of wo­men in so­ci­ety and the lim­its one sets one­self when con­fron­ted with what the so­ci­ety con­siders as im­possible.  Fur­ther­more, the main themes put into dis­cus­sion by the books re­main valid and im­port­ant in all the ad­apt­a­tions, the ques­tion of iden­tity tak­ing a large ex­tent in Alice in Wonderland (2010), while be­liev­ing in the im­possible and ac­cept­ing mad­ness and non­sense as parts of both real­ity and ima­gin­ary worlds are more than ever mean­ing­ful for the post­mod­ern audience.

Bibliography

Car­roll, Lewis. Alice’s ad­ven­tures in Won­der­land & Through the Look­ing – Glass. Wordsworth Clas­sics, 1993.

Co­hen, Mor­ton N., ed­itor. The Let­ters of Lewis Car­roll. Lon­don: Mac­mil­lan, 1979.

Leach, Ka­roline. In the Shadow of the Dreamchild: A New Un­der­stand­ing of Lewis Car­roll. Lon­don: Peter Owen, 1999.

Mal­colm, Noel. The ori­gins of Eng­lish non­sense. Har­per­Collins, 1997.

Alice in Won­der­land: 60th An­niversary Edi­tion — Through the Key­hole: A Com­pan­ion’s Guide to Alice in Won­der­land (Blu-Ray). Walt Dis­ney Stu­dios Home En­ter­tain­ment, 2011.

Bur­ton, Tim. Alice in Won­der­land. 2010, http://​alicein​won​der​land​.wikia​.com/​w​i​k​i​/​Alice_ in_Wonderland_(2010_film). Ac­cessed 26 Novem­ber 2018. 

Car­roll, Lewis. Alice’s Ad­ven­tures Un­der Ground. Manuscript,British Lib­rary, 1864https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/alices-adventures-under-ground-the-original-manuscript-version-of-alices-adventures-in-wonderland. Ac­cessed 12 Decem­ber 2018.

Dis­ney, Walt. Alice in Won­der­land. 1951, http://​dis​ney​-fan​fic​tion​.wikia​.com/​w​i​k​i​/​A​l​ice_in _Wonderland. Ac­cessed 25 Novem­ber 2018.

Alice in Won­der­land. Dir­ec­ted by Clyde Ge­r­on­imi, Wil­fred Jack­son and Hamilton Luske, per­form­ances by Kath­ryn Beau­mont, Ed Wynn and Richard Haydn. DVD, Walt Dis­ney, 1951.

Alice in Won­der­land. Dir­ec­ted by Tim Bur­ton, per­form­ances by Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp and Helena Bon­ham Carter. Blu-Ray, Walt Dis­ney, 2010.

Alice through the look­ing-glass. Dir­ec­ted by James Bobin, per­form­ances by Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp and Helena Bon­ham Carter. Blu-Ray, Walt Dis­ney, 2016.

Lu­ana Marian