Alice in Wonderland (1951 Film) - Production

Production

The history of Walt Disney's association with Lewis Carroll's Alice books (Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass) stretches all the way back to 1923, when Disney was still a 21-year-old filmmaker trying to make a name for himself in Kansas City. When his first series of short cartoons, the Newman Laugh-O-Grams, failed to recoup production costs, the struggling young producer tried to create other short films hoping that one of them would point the way forward. The last of these Kansas City works was called Alice's Wonderland, featuring a live action girl (Virginia Davis) interacting with cartoon characters. While charming, the short failed to receive much notice, and so Walt Disney decided to abandon producing animated films, and left Kansas City to become a live-action film director in Hollywood.

After months of trying, and failing, to find work in live-action, Disney partnered with his older brother Roy to create the Disney Brothers Studio, and they revived the idea of producing animated shorts. The independent distributor M. J. Winkler screened Walt's 1923 Alice short and found it promising, so Winkler agreed to distribute a series of Alice Comedies for the Disney brothers. Jubilant, Walt contacted his former Kansas City colleagues and brought them to Hollywood to work on the new series (a group that today reads like a who's who of American animation legends, including Ub Iwerks, Rudolph Ising, Isadore "Friz" Freleng, and Hugh Harman). From 1924 to 1926, the Disney Brothers Studio produced over fifty short Alice Comedies. The success of this silent film series established Disney as a film producer, and was probably significant for the success of the later Mickey Mouse, usually credited as the first great Disney success.

Walt Disney had a long-standing affection for Alice in Wonderland. For instance, as soon as he began discussing making feature-length films, he returned repeatedly to the idea of making a feature-length version of Alice, but for various reasons, these attempts were never realized. Prior to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Disney planned on making Alice in Wonderland his first feature-length film instead. Like the early Alice Comedies, he planned on using a combination of live-action and animation for the "wonderland" sequences, and in early 1933, a Technicolor screen test was shot with Mary Pickford as Alice. This first attempt by Disney at producing an Alice feature was eventually tabled when Paramount released their own 1933 live-action version, with a script by Cleopatra director Joseph Mankiewicz (brother of Citizen Kane (1941) scribe Herman J. Mankiewicz) and a cast that included Gary Cooper as the White Knight, Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, and W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty.

Disney did not abandon the idea of making an Alice feature. After the enormous success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – as Leonard Maltin writes in his history of Walt Disney's film career, The Disney Films, Walt Disney officially recorded the title Alice in Wonderland with the MPAA in 1938. As preparatory work began on this possible "Alice" feature, the economic devastation of the Second World War as well as the demands of the productions of Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), and Bambi (1942) pushed the "Alice" project aside. After the war, in 1945, Disney proposed a live-action/animated version of Alice in Wonderland that would star Ginger Rogers and would utilize the techniques seen in Disney's The Three Caballeros (1945). Lisa Davis Waltz, who would eventually voice Anita Radcliffe in Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmatians, was also considered for the role of Alice in this proposed version. This, too, fell through, and in 1946, work began on an all-animated version of Alice in Wonderland that would feature art direction heavily based on the famous illustrations of Sir John Tenniel. This version was storyboarded, but was ultimately rejected by Walt, as was yet another proposed live-action/animated version of Alice that would star Luanna Patten (seen in Disney's Song of the South (1946) and So Dear to My Heart (1948)).

In the late 1940s, work resumed on an all-animated Alice with a focus on comedy, music and spectacle as opposed to rigid fidelity to the books, and finally, in 1951, Walt Disney released a feature-length version of Alice in Wonderland to theaters, eighteen years after first discussing ideas for the project and almost thirty years after making his first Alice Comedy. Disney's final version of Alice in Wonderland followed in the traditions of his feature films like Fantasia and The Three Caballeros in that Walt Disney intended for the visuals and the music to be the chief source of entertainment, as opposed to a tightly-constructed narrative like Snow White or Cinderella (1950). Instead of trying to produce an animated "staged reading" of Carroll's books, Disney chose to focus on their whimsy and fantasy, using Carroll's prose as a beginning, not as an end unto itself.

Another choice was decided upon for the look of the film. Rather than faithfully reproducing the famous illustrations of Sir John Tenniel, a more streamlined and less complicated approach was used for the design of the main characters. Background artist Mary Blair took a Modernist approach to her design of Wonderland, creating a world that was recognizable, and yet was decidedly "unreal". Indeed, Blair's bold use of color is one of the film's most notable features.

Finally, in an effort to retain some of Carroll's imaginative verses and poems, Disney commissioned top songwriters to compose songs built around them for use in the film. A record number of potential songs were written for the film, based on Carroll's verses—over 30—and many of them found a way into the film, if only for a few brief moments. Alice in Wonderland would boast the greatest number of songs included in any Disney film, but because some of them last for mere seconds (like "How Do You Do and Shake Hands", "We'll Smoke the Monster Out", "'Twas Brillig", "The Caucus Race", and others), this fact is frequently overlooked. The original song that Alice was to sing in the beginning was titled "Beyond the Laughing Sky". The song, like so many other dropped songs, was not used by the producers. However, the composition was kept and the lyrics were changed. It later became the title song for Peter Pan (which was in production at the same time), "The Second Star to the Right".

The title song, composed by Sammy Fain, was later adopted by jazz pianist Bill Evans and featured on his Sunday at the Village Vanguard.