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URL: https://epub.sub.uni-hamburg.de/epub/volltexte/campus/2015/40175/
Disney in Wonderland : a comparative analysis of Disneys Alice in Wonderland film adaptations from 1951 and 2010
Schütze, Franziska
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| Dokument 1.pdf (22.662 KB)
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| Zugriffsbeschränkung: |
| nur innerhalb des Universitäts-Campus |
| SWD-Schlagwörter: |
| Film |
| DDC-Sachgruppe: |
| Öffentliche Darbietungen, Film, Rundfunk |
| Dokumentart: |
| Monographie |
| Sprache: |
| Englisch |
| Erstellungsjahr: |
| 2011 |
| Publikationsdatum: |
| 06.05.2015 |
| Kurzfassung auf Englisch: |
| Introduction: ‘Every thing’s got a moral, if only you can find it’. Lewis Carroll 1865. In 2015, the first edition of Alice in Wonderland will have its 150th anniversary. The novel as well as its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There have been read by people of all ages and all origins ever since. Due to the widespread success of the literary work, Lewis Carroll’s novels have not only been illustrated by hundreds of artists, but also frequently adapted for film, theatre, opera, music, and other forms of art. Among these numerous adaptations are two motion pictures produced by the Walt Disney Company, which is known for warm-hearted movies for audiences of all ages. The relationship between Alice in Wonderland and Walt Disney even dates back to 1923 when he founded the famous film studio due to a distribution contract for his first completed short film called Alice’s Wonderland. This thesis, however, focuses on the Disney adaptation from 1951 – a 2-D cartoon animation – as well as the most recent film adaptation from 2010 – a combination of live-action film and computer-generated animation. Thus, the main part of this thesis constitutes a comparative analysis of both adaptations regarding the following aspects: the evolution of the visualisations, the different characters of the heroine Alice, the influences of Walt Disney and Tim Burton on the story lines and the styles of the adaptations, and the responses to both films. Thereby, the following research questions should be answered: • What are the specificities of Carroll’s novels? Why did it attract so many filmmakers? • Why did both adaptations employ the medium of animation? Did the medium get implemented successfully? • How did Walt Disney and Tim Burton affect the story lines and the styles of the adaptations? How did the heroine’s character change under their influence? • How did the audiences react to the adaptations? What are the reasons for that? The first theoretical part hence starts with a description of the literary model, which aims at defining the novels’ specificities respectively the essence Carroll tried to convey. Chapter 2 outlines the most important issues of today’s adaptation discourse, since the theory of adaptation serves as the theoretical basis for the comparative analysis. In chapter 3, an overview of the medium of animation will be given, including the medium’s possibilities and challenges as well as its techniques. With chapter 4, the comparative analysis begins by giving contextual information about both films. Afterwards, the before mentioned aspects will be compared: the different visualisations, the different Alices, the different influences, and the different responses. In chapter 9, the preliminary findings will be shortly summarised, and the research questions will be answered. Accordingly, this thesis’ moral can be found in the conclusion. Additionally, the comparative analysis contains a lot of pictures and screenshots from the movies’ scenes in order to illustrate the stated arguments. Regarding this, I sympathise with Alice: ‘what is the use of a book [...] without pictures or conversations?’.Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: I.PART I: INTRODUCTION1 II.PART II: THEORY2 1.The literary model – Lewis Carroll’s novels2 2.Theory of adaptation3 2.1Traditional adaptation discourse4 2.2Adaptation discourse beyond ‘betrayal’ and ‘infidelity’5 3.The medium of animation9 3.1The technique of animation10 3.2The technique of computer-generated animation10 3.3The creative challenges of animation11 3.4The possibilities of animation12 III.PART III: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS13 4.Adapting Alice in Wonderland13 4.1Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951)14 4.2Disney’s Alice in Wonderland 3-D (2010)18 5.The different visualisations of Carroll’s nonsense stories25 5.1John Tenniel’s illustrations26 5.2Alice in Wonderland 1951 – a 2-D cartoon animation27 5.3Alice in Wonderland 2010 – a 3-D fantasy adventure30 6.Three different Alices36 6.1Lewis Carroll’s and John Tenniel’s Alice36 6.2Disney’s cartoon Alice 195138 6.3Disney’s, Woolverton’s, and Burton’s Alice 201040 7.Disney and Burton in Wonderland43 7.1Walt Disney’s influence on the story and style of the 1951 adaptation43 7.2Tim Burton’s influence on the story and style of the 2010 adaptation44 8.Responses to both adaptations46 8.1Responses to Alice in Wonderland 195146 8.2Responses to Alice in Wonderland 201048 9.Conclusion50 IV.PART IV: BIBLIOGRAPHY53 Works Cited53 a.Books and articles53 b.Internet sources55 Table of Figures57 APPENDIXi A)Fig. 4i B)Alice in Cartoonlandii C)Examples of Alice illustrators (except John Tenniel)iv D)Examples of Alice worksxi E)Statutory declarationxviTextprobe:Text Sample: Chapter III, PART III: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS: 4, Adapting Alice in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice in Wonderland as well as its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There came up in 1865 and have been very often adapted ever since. These adaptations include not only film versions of the novel, but also songs, operas, paintings, stage plays, and computer games. Additionally, there are at least as many works of art influenced by or based on Alice in Wonderland, which do not count as adaptations or which pick up only one or few characters. So far, 35 filmic adaptations for cinema or television have been produced. These encompass different types of film, like animation and live-action films, as well as different genres, for example children’s movies, film versions of stage plays, musicals, or even porn movies. Among these 35 film adaptations, there are two versions by the Walt Disney Company. While the first one came up in the lifetime of Walt Disney, the second adaptation was produced 44 years after his death and 59 years after the first one. In the following, the what, who, why, how, when and where of both Disney adaptations of Alice in Wonderland will be examined, without claiming to cover everything, since several questions cannot be answered until the comparative analysis in this part has been realised. 4.1, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951): What? In 1951, the Walt Disney Company released a full-length cartoon animation called Alice in Wonderland. It was the 8th filmic adaptation of Carroll’s novel, but the first completely animated motion picture with a running time of 75 minutes. The film combines characters as well as narratives from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, whereas some characters or parts of the story were left out. Compared to other filmic adaptations, though, Disney’s motion picture retains a lot of Carroll’s original ideas. In Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, the 7-year-old Alice follows a White Rabbit with a waistcoat and a watch and falls down the rabbit hole. After puzzling processes of shrinking and growing Alice floats in a pool of tears and participates in a drying Caucus Race. When she follows the White Rabbit through Wonderland, she meets peculiar characters like Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the talking Live Flowers, and the Cheshire Cat. Alice gets stuck in the White Rabbit’s house, has a conversation with the Caterpillar, which turns into a butterfly afterwards, and joins the Mad Tea Party. After getting lost in a dark and scary Tulgey Wood, the Cheshire Cat shows Alice a way into the Queen of Heart’s garden. During a play of croquet Alice displeases the Queen and is therefore brought to trial. Not only during the trial Disney’s characters use quotations from the literary model, for example the Queen’s ‘sentence first, verdict afterwards”, or Alice’s exclamation ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards’. In order to escape, Alice flees from the Queen and her card soldiers. That’s when she realises that she is asleep in the real world and forces herself to wake up. In the end, Disney’s Alice leaves for home with her sister – happy that Wonderland was just a dream. While Disney retained a lot of Carroll’s story lines of the Alice novels, the medium of the adaptation is a completely different one. The way from novel to cartoon animation could not have been paced without changes. The discussion of Walt Disney’s implementation of animation will be part of the comparative analysis of both adaptations. Who? In the case of Disney’s 1951 adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, Walt Disney can be considered as the adapter, since e was personally responsible for the final outcome of the film production. However, all the other persons involved in the production process contributed to the film’s development. Witness the production supervisor Ben Sharpsteen, the directors Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and Wilfred Jackson, as well as the ten animating directors, the screenwriters, the character animators, and last but not least the composer Oliver Wallace. On the whole, it was Walt Disney, though, who made all important decisions and coordinated the creative work of his employees. One of the film’s directors, Wilfred Jackson, described Walt Disney as follows: ‘Walt was a very persuasive individual and a very inspiring person and he had the ability to make you want to do what he wanted you to do’. Today, Walt Disney is considered to be the pioneer of the branch of animation. Though he was not the first to animate drawn pictures, he was the first to combine animated motion pictures with sound. Thus, Walt Disney was the actuator, who made the animation medium commercially viable for mass audiences. ‘Thanks to his determination and competence, in the succeeding decades Disney’s tradition and influence on animation became so deep and complex that they created a style that marks, in an indelible way, the history of the art of animation. [...] Disney’s animated movies made the various fairytales and epic tales that already are part of the universal cultural heritage even more popular’. Nevertheless, there was another important artist in the development process of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland – graphic designer Mary Blair. Her conceptual, surreal illustrations influenced the visual style of the cartoon animation obviously. Why? Walt Disney definitely was enthusiastic about Carroll’s novels since the earliest days of his career. Alice’s Wonderland was his first completed short film in 1923, featuring a live girl interacting with animated cartoon animals. When his first own film studio, Laugh-O-Gram, went bankrupt that year, this film was the only thing he could take along to Los Angeles. Although he did not have in mind to carry on animating films and intended to become a movie director in one of Hollywood’s big film studios, it was due to Alice’s Wonderland that he was able to gain a foothold in that upcoming centre of the world-wide film industry. M. J. Winkler offered him a contract for producing a series of Alice short films, called Alice in Cartoonland. Hence, the day Walt Disney signed this contract is deemed to be the day of the Walt Disney Company’s foundation. From 1924 to 1926, Disney produced a series of 57 Alice shorts, the story lines of which were not closely related to Carroll’s novels. Nevertheless, it was due to Alice’s Wonderland and Alice in Cartoonland that the rise of the Walt Disney Company began. In the following years, Disney planned several times to produce a full-length adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, although he was aware of the challenge’s dimension: ‘When you deal with such a popular classic you’re laying yourself wide open to the critics’. How? Since Walt Disney had to drop his plans for a full-length adaptation of Alice in Wonderland several times – for example because of the 1933 Paramount film version – the question of the how of adaptation changed over the years as well. Firstly, he planned to produce a combination of cartoon animation and live-action movie, and changed his ideas about the starring juvenile actress every once a while. In 1946, he finally announced the making of a full-length cartoon animation orientated towards the style of John Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Thus, the medium for the adaptation had been determined. In the case of Walt Disney, the question of audiences coheres with all the other work of his company. The Walt Disney studios are mainly known for warm-hearted, dreamlike family movies, especially suitable for children. Usually, Walt Disney took up known fairy tales or folk stories and made cartoon animations out of them, in order to broaden their appeal for an American mass audience. Many theorists call this process Disneyfication. Richard Schickel, for example, defines this term as ‘...that shameless process by which everything the Studio later touched, no matter how unique the vision of the original from which the studio worked, was reduced to the limited terms Disney and his people could understand. Magic, mystery, individuality ... were consistently destroyed when a literary work passed through this machine that had been taught there was only one correct way to draw’. As part of this process the original work gets sanitised, trivialised, and Americanised, how it is considered to be typical for Hollywood film productions. Whereas Schickel obviously describes Disneyfication as a negative process, the intention to popularise a literary work is not necessarily negative, since it can help the source novel survive. On the whole, Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) can be considered as ‘disneyfied” adaptation of Carroll’s novels for knowing as well as for unknowing audiences. Knowing audiences can recognise many of Carroll’s peculiar creatures, whereas unknowing audiences can experience a colourful and expressive cartoon animation, whereof they can make sense without knowing the source text. When? Where? When Disney released Alice in Wonderland in 1951, his film studio had already become the market leader in the animation industry. Walt Disney, who considered animation a form of art since its earliest days, had such a great influence on the development of this industry because of his creativity as well as his enthusiasm for technical innovations. Although he did not invent the medium, he defined it and, therefore, influenced the path animation should take thereafter. However, even the market leader in the animation industry had to face hard times as well. In these early days of animation, the production of animated short films usually caused more expenses than earnings. Facing economic recession in the 1930s, Disney decided to produce more full-length features instead of short films in the future. With Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the first full-length animation was released in 1937. This as well as the following animated movies became popular among wide audiences. While some of them – witness Dumbo, Bambi and Cinderella – rank as standard classics, others are hardly known or available today. Particularly in the eight years between Bambi in 1942 and Cinderella in 1950 no feature gained much attention. Thus, Robin Allan calls them the ‘lost years’ of Disney. Notwithstanding this, the work of these years influenced the later films, especially Alice in Wonderland, which ‘actually comes at the end of a line of experimentation’. In addition, Walt Disney himself sympathised – despite earlier socialist activities of his father – with the conservative Republicans. Since some of his animators organized themselves and founded the Screen Cartoonist Guilde as workers’ representation, that called a strike in his studio in 1941, his conservative views were strengthened once and for all. In 1944, Disney and some comrades with the same political conviction founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPA) with the intention to maintain the American way of life on screen as well as in their employees’ minds. These conservative views can be recognised in all his films’ morals and moral concepts. Some theorists even consider Disney’s films as anti-communist propaganda, for example José Bernardo Hernández Ávila who takes the view that: ‘Disney’s film Alice in Wonderland, is a political satire of the post-World War II and beginnings of the Cold War context and the complexity of the international order in such historical transition period’. Even though this extreme position is debatable, it considers the impact of the social and political context of post-war America on the production of Alice in Wonderland. On the whole, the when and where of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) summarise the context on the side of production – the personal conservative views of Walt Disney, being the leader of the market leader in a fledgling industry in post-war America – and the context on the side of reception – American post-war society, which already knew Walt Disney from his earlier successful films and thus had certain expectations towards new productions of the film studio. |
