Alice in Wonderland
In 1920 Walt Disney had produced ‘the Alice Comedies’; his shorts which had given him his first success. They were about a real girl named Alice, who walked around in a drawn world. In 1933 Walt Disney considered a live-action/animation version of the story, starring Mary Pickford as Alice, and some color screen tests were made of her. Disney recognised that due to running time constraints and continuity demands he needed to scale the story down a bit.
Because Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for the Alice books were so well known, Walt Disney acquired the rights to them as the basis for the characters of his movie. Sometimes the character designs had to be adapted to suit the animation form. The production of Alice in Wonderland began in 1946. The film took five years to finish and it cost the studio about $3 million, partly because a full-length live action film was shot. When Alice in Wonderland was finally released, however, the audiences were disappointed. They felt that Disney had failed to capture the atmosphere and intellectual humor of Lewis Carroll’s story. Disney too was disappointed with the film and blamed it’s lack of success on Alice’s “lack of heart”.
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