Alice in Wonderland is a 1951 American animated musical fantasy comedy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. It's based on Lewis Carroll's 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass. The production was supervised by Ben Sharpsteen, and was directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. With the voices of Kathryn Beaumont, Ed Wynn, Richard Haydn, Sterling Holloway, Jerry Colonna, Verna Felton, J. Pat O'Malley, Bill Thompson, and Heather Angel, the film follows a young girl Alice who falls down a rabbit hole to enter a nonsensical world Wonderland that is ruled by the Queen of Hearts, while encountering strange creatures, including the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat.
Walt Disney first tried to adapt Alice into a feature-length animated feature film in the 1930s starring Mary Pickford as Alice, but were scrapped in favor of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). However, the idea was eventually revived in the 1940s, following the success of Snow White. The film was originally intended to be a live-action/animated film, but Disney decided it would be the fully animated feature film. During its production, many sequences adapted from Carroll's books were later omitted, such as Jabberwocky, the White Knight, the Duchess, Mock Turtle and the Gryphon.
Plot[]
Near a riverbank in England, a young and imaginative girl named Alice and her cat Dinah, listens distractedly to her older sister's history lesson. Alice is bored with the ordinary world and begins daydreaming of a world—where nothing is but pictures and nonsense. She spots a passing White Rabbit in a waistcoat, who panics of being late. Driven by her intense curiosity, Alice follows him into a burrow and plummets down a deep rabbit hole, leaving Dinah behind. Upon landing in a nonsensical place called Wonderland, she finds herself facing a tiny door, whose talking Doorknob advises drinking from a bottle on a nearby table. She shrinks to an appropriate height, but has forgotten the key on the table. She then eats a cookie that causes her to grow excessively. Exasperated by these changes of state, she begins to cry and floods the room with her tears. She takes another sip from the bottle to shrink again, and rides the empty bottle through the keyhole. As Alice continues to follow the Rabbit after encountering anthropomorphic characters, including Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who recount the tale of The Walrus and the Carpenter, in teaching that curiosity can lead to trouble. Alice tracks the Rabbit to his house; he mistakes her for his housemaid, "Mary Ann", and sends her inside to retrieve his gloves. While searching for the gloves, she carelessly eats another cookie and grows giant, getting stuck in the house. Thinking her a monster, the Rabbit asks the Dodo to help expel her. When Bill the Lizard gets blown out of the chimney, Dodo decides to burn the house down, until Alice escapes when eating a carrot from the Rabbit's garden that causes her to shrink to 3 inches tall.
Continuing to follow the Rabbit, Alice meets a garden of talking flowers who initially welcome her with a song, but then banish her, believing that humans are a type of weed. Alice then encounters a Caterpillar smoking, who becomes enraged at Alice after she laments her small size, which the Caterpillar turns into a butterfly and flies away. Before leaving, the Caterpillar advises Alice to eat a piece from different sides of a mushroom to alter her size. Following a period of trial and error, she returns to her original height and keeps the remaining pieces in her pocket. In the Tulgey Woods, Alice gets stuck between multiple paths and encounters the grinning mischievous Cheshire Cat, who suggests questioning the Mad Hatter or the March Hare to learn the Rabbit's location, but is unhelpful in giving directions. Taking her own path, Alice encounters both, in the midst of an "unbirthday" tea party celebration. The Hatter and the Hare ask Alice to explain her predicament, to which Alice tries, but becomes frustrated by their interruptions and absurd logic. As she prepares to leave, the Rabbit appears and the Hatter attempts to repair his pocket watch, resulting it go haywire. Alice attempts to follow the Rabbit again after he is ejected from the premises, but decides to go home instead. Unfortunately, her surroundings completely change, leaving her lost in the Tulgey Woods and she begins to cry along with many forest creatures, which vanish. Alice has come to the realization that Wonderland is a place full of mad inhabitants which was not what she had expected.
The Cheshire Cat reappears to the despondent Alice. He guides her that one's path cannot be found unless you know for certain, and then he offers a secret passage to the tyrannical Queen of Hearts, the only one in Wonderland who can take Alice home. In the Queen's labyrinthine garden, Alice finally got her answer seeing the Rabbit happens to serves as a chamberlain to the Queen – whom is sentencing a trio of playing cards to beheading for painting mistakenly-planted white rosebushes red. The Queen invites a reluctant Alice to play against her in a croquet match, in which live flamingos, card guards, and hedgehogs are used as equipment. The equipment rigs the game in favor of the Queen. Cheshire Cat appears again and plays a trick on the Queen, setting up Alice to be framed. Before the Queen can sentence her to execution, the King suggests a formal trial. At Alice's trial, Cheshire Cat invokes more chaos by having Alice point him out, causing one of the witnesses – the Dormouse – to panic. As the Queen sentences Alice to execution, Alice eats the mushroom pieces to grow large, momentarily intimidating the court. However, the mushroom's effect is short-lived, forcing Alice to flee through the deteriorating realm with a large crowd in pursuit. When Alice reaches the same tiny door, the Doorknob shows herself sleeping through the keyhole, revealing that Wonderland isn't real. She awakens from her dream by the sound of her sister. Alice is still in crazy thought, but thanks to her adventures in Wonderland she has come to understand the importance of logic and courtesy. She walks home with her sister to relax and have tea.
Cast[]
- Kathryn Beaumont as Alice
- Ed Wynn as Mad Hatter
- Jerry Colonna as March Hare
- Richard Haydn as Caterpillar
- Sterling Holloway as Cheshire Cat
- Verna Felton as Queen of Hearts
- J. Pat O'Malley as Tweedledum and Tweedledee/The Walrus and the Carpenter/Mother Oyster
- Bill Thompson as White Rabbit/The Dodo
- Heather Angel as Alice's sister
- Joseph Kearns as Doorknob
- Larry Grey as Bill the Lizard/Card Painter
- Queenie Leonard as A Bird in a Tree/Snooty Flower
- Dink Trout as King of Hearts
- Doris Lloyd as The Rose
- Jimmy MacDonald as The Dormouse
- The Mellomen (Thurl Ravenscroft, Bill Lee, Max Smith, and Bob Hamlin) as Card Painters
- Don Barclay as Other Cards
- Lucille Bliss as Flowers
- Pinto Colvig as Flamingos
- Tommy Luske as Young Pansy
- Clarence Nash as Dinah
- Marni Nixon as Singing Flowers
- Norma Zimmer as White Rose
- Mel Blanc as Bread-and-Butterflies
Danske Stemmer[]
1951 (Dub)
- Iselil Larsen – Alice
- Elith Foss – Peter Kanin
- Sigrid Horne-Rasmussen – Hjerte Dame
- Svend Asmussen – Tvilling Di
- Ulrik Neumann – Tvilling Dum
- Knud Heglund – Den Gale hattemager
- Ove Sprogøe – Haren
- John Price – Kålormen
- Sigurd Langberg – Dodo
- Svend Asmussen – Roshval
- Ulrik Neumann – Tømmermanden
- Astrid Villaume – Søster
- Dirch Passer – Håndtaget
- Buster Larsen – Firbenet Brormand
- Arthur Jensen – Hjerte Dame
- Kirsten Rolffes – Syvsovermusen
- Kirsten Rolffes – Fuglen
- Kirsten Rolffes – Rosen
1998 (Dub)
- Amalie Dollerup – Alice
- Donald Andersen – Peter Kanin
- Susanne Lundberg – Hjerte Dame
- Henrik Koefoed – Tvilling Di
- Henrik Koefoed – Tvilling Dum
- Torben Zeller – Den Gale Hattemager
- Thomas Mørk – Haren
- Torben Sekov – Kålormen
- John Hahn-Petersen – Filurkatten
- Henning Moritzen – Dodo
- Aage Haugland – Roshval
- Søren Sætter-Lassen – Tømmermanden
- Pauline Rehné – Søster
- Peter Aude – Håndtaget
- Henrik Sloth – Firbenet Brormand
- Dennis Hansen – Hjerte Konge
- Michelle Bjørn-Andersen – Syvsovermusen
Østers Børn
- Mads Sætter-Lassen
- Maria Rangan Paulsen
Kort
- Torben Sekov
- Peter Aude
- Henrik Sloth