Nozz Review of Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland (1949)

A good job, though technically awkward by today's standards

[6/10 · 10 February 2012]

Here's the good, the bad, and the disclaimer. First the good. The movie places Alice in Wonderland in proper context, with a prologue featuring Charles Dodgson as an Oxfordian who is inwardly iconoclastic but no firebrand, and who enjoys the company of innocent girls a generation younger. As the Alice story unfolds, we can see how it provides Dodgson an opportunity to satirize his own environment. The movie makers invent some parallels, but the inventions are benign and well within the spirit of the original. Dodgson, for example, has furtively stolen a tart in the prologue. Perhaps the most successful aspect of the movie is the stylized sets through which Alice roams. They are completely believable as stage scenery, while on the other hand they can easily accommodate the stop-motion puppets who play the Wonderland characters, so that they smoothly mediate between the natural and the artificial. What's bad about the movie is that the puppets are mostly crude and offputting in their design and movement. If I hadn't seen the year cited here on IMDb, I would have pegged the movie a good decade and a half earlier-- also because of the badly dated music. But the disclaimer I must provide is that the print I saw may not do justice to the movie. It had no color, the sound was less than perfectly synchronized, and the picture was not very sharp. Maybe a good color print would have looked more pleasant and up-to-date.