I think Disney’s 1951 version of Alice in Wonderland is not only my favorite adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories, but probably my favorite cartoon from the “Golden Age” of color animated feature films. of the study that began with Snow White in 1937; Although it could easily have been different for more than a decade before and before the creation of Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney and his founding partner Ub Iwerks produced their first short film Alice in Wonderland (1923), which started a series of films. animated and live action. -reelers known simply as the “Alice Comedies”.
The success of the “Alice Comedies” allowed Disney to move from Kansas City to Hollywood, and before they were finished in 1927, it had already begun developing a film version that would be protected and rerun several times before emerging as the feature. number 13 of the study in Animated. Classic series. What struck me the most when I first saw it as a kid was how much more stylized it was than the standard bucolic Disney fair, like Pinocchio or Bambi, and this more abstract, almost cubist style conceived by background artist Mary Blair intrigued and attracted me.
While there were surreal moments in previous Disney films, like Fantasia and the hallucinogenic Elephants on Parade sequence in Dumbo, the visual chaos never quite stuck like when Alice falls down the rabbit hole and enters Lewis Carroll’s upside-down world. who, in turn, was inspired by the avant-garde Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in Victorian England, known for dabbling in mind-altering recreational drugs like laudanum and absinthe; although as the son of a clergyman and professor of mathematics at Oxford University, the chaste Charles Dodgson (also known as Lewis Carroll) would never dream of indulging.
As with all of their Blu-ray releases, this Disney 60th anniversary edition, despite the age of the source material, is demo-quality. I’ve always thought Alice in Wonderland looked pretty sharp on DVD, but the color saturation, vibrancy and clarity of the 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 encoding are impressive. The film is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio with the option to replace the black sidebars with very subtle matching artwork which I must admit I prefer. The 5.1 DTS HD-MA mix is well balanced, maintains clear dialogue, and enhances sound effects, songs, and incidental music with spatial surround sound that helps immerse modern viewers.
This single disc contains all the features included on the DVD release, most of which have been upscaled to HD, including the wonderful Mickey Mouse Thru the Mirror short film inspired by Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, as well like the original silent short film. Alice’s Wonderland and a lot of deleted material. The best HD exclusive, however, is Through the Keyhole: A Companion’s Guide to Wonderland, which expands the picture-in-picture concept into a holistic “making of” that runs concurrently with the original film, providing a wealth of background information on the production and the life and times of Charles Dodgson and Alice Liddell, the girl who inspired the Wonderland stories.
Disney has never missed a trick in remarketing its back catalogue, but the quality of these high-definition releases continues to amaze me and it’s hard to imagine that what we’re seeing now won’t still be the definitive version of these timeless classics, I’m looking forward to it. looking forward to Peter Pan the next installment.
