Alice’s Wonderland (1923)

Alice’s Wonderland Review

Alice’s Wonderland is a 1923 animated short film from the Alice Comedies series. It’s a terrific short.

This movie started off the Alice Comedies series with a bang and with it the Disney Animation history was kick-started and the world has never been the same again. Thus, this was a crucial short in the history of the medium and it has aged surprisingly well.

For a movie called Alice’s Wonderland, it doesn’t actually adapt the Lewis Carroll book. It starts Virginia Davis, an actress who was four years old at the time of filming this short, and she is just so charming and lively, delivering a classic silent film performance that is still endearing to this day. She gets to visit the Disney studio and she sees animators doing their job, even including Walt Disney himself without his signature moustache.

Eventually, she dreams about this cartoon land where she is greeted by the animals until being attacked by lions. I found that third act with the lions rather forgettable. The teeth sharpening gag worked and was delightfully goofy, but other than that, this sequence was repetitive, overlong and dull.

But the rest of the cartoon was superb. This movie actually mixed live-action with animation in a different way than other films from the period as Alice is a real human actress and everything around her is animated. How she fits this world and how she reacts to the cartoon characters in sync was simply incredible to witness for such an old short. The score and sound effects added to the movie were also wonderful and so were those comic book touches in the form of described sounds on screen.

Alice’s Wonderland is an iconic Disney short that kick-started the Alice Comedies with a bang. It has a weaker ending, but otherwise it’s a technologically inventive, charming and wonderfully endearing and imaginative short that has stood the test of time gloriously and is still enjoyable to this day.

My Rating – 4.2