Yesterday, March 14th, I attended an event held at my school’s library where Dr. Jan Susina spoke for the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. He presented the topic of “From Alice’s Wonderland to Alice in Wonderland: Walt Disney’s Problem Child.” Going into the event, I was already intrigued as to what I would learn because I am a huge fan of Alice in Wonderland myself. Here are just a few of the things I learned:
The original story was written by Lewis Carroll, who revolutionized the field of literature by introducing fantasy and nonsense in a time of strictly victorian style writing. Walt Disney grew to love the story and got the license to make it a film as soon as he could. He developed the first story board when planning for this film. It took many years of planning and drawing to get his vision right. I found it funny that when he was trying to get it produced, English producers thought the drawings were too bright/ colorful, but Americans thought it wasn’t bright enough. Walt eventually decided to appeal to the Americans. He struggled with keeping Carroll’s novel true to the original imagery and spirit, while also appealing to an American audience. He added new characters, like the talking doorknob, and combined and/or cut some characters as well, like combining the four queens into just the Queen of Hearts.
The saddest part of this story is that after all the years of Disney working on this film, he died before it finally got released in 1951. But maybe that wasn’t a terrible thing since it didn’t do so well financially when it first hit the box office. It was however the fist feature length animation to be featured on TV.
I was fascinated with how many versions/adaptations of Carroll’s story have been produced. It makes me wonder what Carroll would have thought them all. Would he have liked them or be offended by them?
Overall, the speaker did well at presenting his essay by showing a powerpoint with pictures that went along with the topic. He lost my focus a bit because he was using very academic language, since he was reading fro this paper. However he regained my attention and interest when he started to sing one of the songs from the movie. I wanted to stay for the question answer portion at the end but I had to be somewhere. I would have liked to ask him more about which characters were changed from the original story and the reasoning behind making those changes.
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