Plot
On the bank of a tranquil English river, a young girl named Alice grows bored of listening to her older sister read aloud from a history book of William I of England. When her sister chastises Alice's daydreaming, Alice tells her cat Dinah that she would prefer to live in a nonsensical dreamland called Wonderland. Alice and Dinah spot a waistcoat-wearing White Rabbit passing by, and Alice gives chase as he rushes off claiming to be late for an unknown event. Alice follows him into a rabbit hole and falls into a labyrinth. She begins to float. She sees the White Rabbit disappear into a tiny door and tries to follow, but the door's talking knob advises her to alter her size using a mysterious drink and food. Alice eventually manages to shrink and passes through the door's keyhole and into Wonderland. She meets several strange characters including the Dodo and Tweedledee and Tweedledum who recount the tale of "The Walrus and the Carpenter."
Alice eventually finds the White Rabbit in his house, but before she can ask what he is late for, she is sent to fetch some gloves. She eats a cookie and grows into a giant again, getting stuck in the rabbit's house. The White Rabbit, the Dodo, and chimney sweep Bill the Lizard believe Alice to be a monster and plot to burn the house down. Alice escapes by eating a carrot and shrinking down to the size of an insect. She meets and sings with some talking flowers, but they chase her away upon accusing her of being a weed. Alice is then instructed by the hookah-smoking Caterpillar to eat a part of his mushroom grow back to her original size. Alice decides to keep the remaining pieces of the mushroom on hand.
Alice meets the Cheshire Cat who advises her to visit the Mad Hatter, March Hare and the Dormouse. The three are hosting a mad tea party and celebrate Alice's "unbirthday", a day where it is not her birthday. The White Rabbit appears, but the March Hare and Mad Hatter destroy his pocketwatch and throw him out of the party. Fed up with all the wonderlandians' rudeness and wackiness, Alice abandons her pursuit of the White Rabbit and decides to go home, but gets lost in the Tulgey Wood. The Cheshire Cat appears and leads Alice into a giant hedge maze ruled by the tyrannical Queen of Hearts and her smaller husband, the King of Hearts. The Queen beheads anyone who enrages her, and invites Alice in a bizarre croquet match using flamingoes and hedgehogs as the equipment.
The Cheshire Cat appears again and pulls a trick on the Queen which she accuses Alice of doing, and Alice is put on trial. Just then, she remembers that she still has the remains of the Caterpillar's mushroom. She eats it and grows to an enormous height which the King claims is forbidden in court. Now a gigantic size, Alice feels free to speak her mind and in doing so she openly insults the Queen. However, she had hastily eaten both sides of the mushroom and shrinks to her normal size. She is forced to flee after the Queen orders her execution. Alice becomes pursued by most of Wonderland's characters until she finally reunites with the Doorknob, who then tells her she is having a dream, forcing Alice to wake herself up. The film ends as Alice and her sister head home for tea.
Read more about this topic: Alice In Wonderland (1951 film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)