When comparing Svankmajer's 1988 Alice to the 1951 Disney film Alice in Wonderland it is hard to draw any comparisons. For one, Alice is live action/stop motion while the Disney version is complete animation. Secondly, Alice is based only on Lewis Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the Disney version combines elements of Caroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Thirdly, in Disney's version the protagonist actually imagines or travels to another world, while in Alice she merely wanders around her home. And although they both revolve around the same story these two couldn't be anymore different.
Svankmajer's cult classic is dark, twisted and horror like. For one, the mood is darkened by the color scheme he shoots with. There are no vibrant colors and if there is movement, it is robotic stop-motion. The protagonist herself is so unemotional and so zombie like it is unnerving. When I think of a child's imagination I think, while given a little off beat, happy, colorful, and hyper. She is nothing of the sort, which inherently is not a bad thing, it is just a strange thing. In her world the animals sentenced by the red queen to get their heads lopped off, do in fact get their heads cut off...with scissors. At the end she even considers cutting off the white rabbits head herself. While being faithful to the book, the film brings to life the darker side of the novel and the darker side of childhood. I suppose not every child has thoughts of flowers, bunnies and cute, cuddly creatures.
While Disney's film would have you think otherwise. Children's heads are filled with flowers, bunnies, and vibrant colors. Alice, a hopelessly lost child, wearing an innocent blue dress, white stockings and a bow in her hair is a victim of her own imagination, not the evil mastermind behind it. She is an unwilling protagonist that just wants to return home. Some of the characters she meets are mean, but always in a friendly sort of way and they are all lost just as much as she. Plastering the screen with vibrant colors, quick movement and even faster editing, Wonderland comes to life as a labyrinth of amusement. Taking from both books, Alice must go deeper into her imagination to bring herself home. Taking more a stance on womens' rights, the Disney film seeks to give young girls imagination, but not to get them too lost in any ideas, after all they must return home like good girls in time for tea.
Alas, both films, although different, are in perfect complement of each other. One stands for the darker side of the imagination, the other stands for the bright, less horrifying side of imagination. Both drawing from the same source material and each giving it their own twist, none is wrong, they just brighten or darken depending on the mood they're trying to convey.
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