Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland was an incredible piece of surrealist literature, written by Lewis Carroll in the dying years of the 19th century. It has since kept its status as one of the most artistic novels of all time, with all sorts of hypnotically brilliant art emerging as a result.
While Hollywood got a hold of the concept in recent years and produced some worryingly poor adaptations, the original 1951 Disney film was a visual masterpiece. It was based primarily on Carroll’s first book (though we’ll soon see how some of the ideas from his sequel make their way in), so we’ve taken a look at the differences between the two versions.
The Cheshire Cat’s Execution
One of the most iconic pieces of imagery from Alice In Wonderland is that of the Cheshire Cat. He has taken on a life of his own in media, prompting various parodies and getting up to all sorts of adventures. However, his biggest adventure came in Lewis Carroll’s original novel. During the trial, the Cheshire Cat was publicly up for execution, meaning all of the characters knew of his existence.
In the film, he seems to only be visible to Alice. Does this mean the films took him from a character in his own right, into nothing more than a figment of Alice’s imagination?
Alice’s Sister
The end of Alice In Wonderland is one of the first true ‘it was all a dream’ tropes. In the film, Alice is chased so far that she ends up coming across the sleeping version of herself (very meta) and wakes up with her au pair standing over her. In the book, Alice emerges from her dream with the cards turning into the leaves above her head (in real life) and her sister is with her. The twist comes when her sister reveals that she had the very same dream...
The Deck Of Cards
The original book makes a point of the fact that the deck of cards presiding over the Queen’s kingdom are all Hearts. In fact, she enforces some pretty serious penalties if any suit aside from Hearts is mentioned. As such, all of the soldiers who give Alice such a tough time are hearts. In the film, they are made up of the entire deck, providing a dark black color palette to contrast the reds of the Hearts.
Tweedledee And Tweedledum
Two of the most memorable characters from the Alice In Wonderland universe are Tweedledum and Tweedledee, a pair of very bizarre twins. These two aren’t introduced until Carroll’s sequel, alongside a set of flowers who are able to talk.
However, the Disney film inserts both the twins and the talking flowers into the universe of the first film’s events. It’s pretty lucky for viewers that they did, as we’d have never seen them otherwise.
Carrots vs Cakes
Alice In Wonderland is full of bitesize foods. ‘Eat Me’ and ‘Drink Me’ are phrases that have somehow ended up more synonymous with the 19th century novel than the actual concept of consumption. Alice ends up inside the White Rabbit’s house needing to become smaller in order to escape, so the films show her eating some magical carrots from his garden. In the books, Carroll obviously wanted the heroine to treat herself to something a little more delicious, choosing to hide some miniature cakes around his house.
The King
Proving to be much more meek than his violent, angry and authoritative wife, the king ended up being rather nice to the confused Alice. However, the book portrayed him in a totally different light.
He didn’t come off as quite as evil as the Queen of Hearts, but he didn’t exactly treat Alice with the respect one might expect when paying a visit to a confusing dream realm.
No Mock Turtle
It’s an interesting name, the Mock Turtle. Is he a fake turtle? Is he a turtle that likes to mock people? Whatever he is, we never get to see a cartoon visualization of him. Despite his presence in the book, he never appears in the film in any form. On top of this, we are never introduced to (or even hear mention of) the interesting characters of the Gryphon or the Lobster Quadrille. What a shame.
The Trial
One of the biggest ways the film deviates from the storyline of the book is the subject of the trial. In the film, Alice doesn’t really take her impending criminal proceedings very seriously, mocking the violent queen and confusedly trying to make sense of the situation as she is tried.
However, in the book, Alice isn’t the subject of the trial at all. She simply observes as the Cheshire Cat is up for execution, and the Knave Of Hearts is the one actually being tried.
Crawling Caterpillar
As any film has to do, the big-screen adaptation of Alice In Wonderland had to be full of its fair share of visual spectacles. Well, it was always going to be particularly gifted in that department, what with such a vast landscape of colorful, trippy and downright bizarre imagery to draw on. Even such, the filmmakers decided to depict the caterpillar as turning into a graceful butterfly, rather than simply crawling away from Alice as he does in the novel.
The Unbirthday Party
If you go into Alice In Wonderland expecting some very clear-cut ideas built on logic and the human experience, you’re going to be sorely mistaken. One of the weirder concepts comes from Through The Looking Glass, And What Alice Found There; the ‘Unbirthday’ party.
This is what the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse are celebrating in the film. However, in the first Alice In Wonderland book, they’re actually having a never-ending tea party, because (another surrealist idea coming up) the Mad Hatter got into an argument with time itself.