Disney’s Alice in Wonderland Poster FRAMED

Description

Alice in Wonderland is a 1951 British-American animated musical fantasy comedy-adventure film produced by Walt Disney Productions and based primarily on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with several additional elements from Through the Looking-Glass. The 13th in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film was released in New York City and London on July 26, 1951. The film features the voices of Kathryn Beaumont (who later voiced Wendy Darling in the 1953 Disney film Peter Pan) as Alice, and Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter. The theme song, “Alice in Wonderland”, has since become a jazz standard. While the film was critically panned on its initial release, the movie proved to be ahead of its time and has since been regarded as one of Disney’s greatest animated classics, as well as one of the best film adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s novel.

Kathryn Beaumont as Alice. On a golden summer day at the bank of a tranquil river in the year 1862, a little 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 kitten Dinah that she can live in a nonsensical magical land called Wonderland. While she is daydreaming, Alice and Dinah spot a waistcoat-wearing White Rabbit passing by, and Alice gives chase as he rushes off saying that he is “late for an important date”. Alice follows him into a rabbit hole and falls into a labyrinth.

The history of Walt Disney’s association with Lewis Carroll’s Alice books (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass) stretches all the way back to his childhood. Like many children of the time he was familiar with the Alice books and had read them as a school boy.

In 1945, shortly after the war ended, Disney revived Alice in Wonderland and assigned British author Aldous Huxley to re-write the script. However Walt felt that Huxley’s version was too much of a literal adaptation of Carroll’s book. Background artist Mary Blair submitted some concept drawings for Alice in Wonderland. Blair’s paintings moved away from Tenneil’s sketchy illustrations by taking a modernist stance, using bold and unreal colors. Walt liked Blair’s designs, and the script was re-written to focus on comedy, music, and the whimsical side to Carroll’s book.

Almost two decades after its original release, after the North American success of George Dunning’s animated film Yellow Submarine (1968), Disney’s version of Alice in Wonderland suddenly found itself in vogue with the times. In fact, because of Mary Blair’s art direction and the long-standing association of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland with the drug culture, the feature was re-discovered as something of a “head film” (along with Fantasia and The Three Caballeros) among the college-aged and was shown in various college towns across the country. The Disney company resisted this association, and even withdrew prints of the film from universities, but then, in 1974, the Disney company gave Alice in Wonderland its first theatrical re-release ever, and the company even promoted it as a film in tune with the “psychedelic” times (mostly from the hit song “White Rabbit” performed by Jefferson Airplane). This re-release was so successful it warranted a subsequent re-release in 1981. Its first UK re-release was on July 26, 1979. By the 1980s, the initial consensus of the movie proved to be outdated. The film gained critical acclaim and became one of the most popular Disney movies of all time. Today, not only is the film considered the best movie adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s novel, but also one of Disney’s great classics.

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, but lost to An American in Paris.

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Frame is shrinkwrapped until time of purchase. Ships boxed with packing peanuts.

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