Most formats take a while to come into their own. Who can remember the first horrible DVDs? The first discs were defined by a paucity of special features, with most blurbs proudly boasting Scene Access and Interactive Menus as the carrot for you to give us those old VHS tapes. Then there was the packaging itself which came, depending on the studio, in a variety of horrible designs (the cardboard ones proffered by Warner Brothers stand out as especially awful in my memory). Disney were likewise slow to live up to recognise the potential of the new format, with the studios first releases which, as it happens, included
Alice in Wonderland - resolutely vanilla. Though you always sensed the marketing wing was holding back the good stuff for the fourth or fifth re-issue a couple of years down the line. It came as a pleasant surprise then that Disney entered the Blu-ray market in less reserved and less cynical fashion, with their first handful of Animation Studios back catalogue titles immediately standing up as reference quality both in terms of visual/audio quality and with regards to supplementary materials. Take their first Blu-ray animated classic release as an example: Sleeping Beauty is a collectors dream. As well as including the film on DVD (before that was anything like the industry standard it is now), the package included two Blu-ray discs packed with incredible documentaries and sported the single best commentary Ive ever heard on any film to this day with John Lasseter, Leonard Maltin and animator Andreas Deja providing passionate and insightful analysis throughout the feature. This commentary track (marketed as the Cine-Explore Experience) used picture-in-picture windows to show concept art alongside the finished film and to play archive video interviews with key personnel during relevant sections of the movie. Disney also used the new format to make the film commercially available in its original aspect ratio, Super Technirama 70, for the first time which improves the film immeasurably. It is quite simply a perfect Blu-ray and takes full advantage of the format. Full marks Disney. I had hoped that this Cine-Explore feature would become a standard part of Disney animated Blu-ray and looked forward to seeing it on even the most neglected films in the canon (such as Oliver & Company or even Make Mine Music). However, the most recent releases have abandoned the presumably expensive and time-consuming concept entirely and - though it made a welcome return on the disc for Pixars Toy Story 3 - it is again absent on
last weeks release of Alice in Wonderland. Its a shame because Alice in particular has an interesting place in Disney history, not least of all for the beautiful
Mary Blair concept art that has - along with her similarly inspired work for what would be Disneys next feature: Peter Pan - been made the subject of books and documentaries in the past. Its a pity that her art didnt make more of an impact on the final look of the film, but it still stands up in its own right (I advise you to Google it when you have a moment). Alice in Wonderland, released in 1951, came during what could be considered the first Disney renaissance. It followed directly off the back of Cinderella and, along with that film, it marked the animation studios resurgence after the forgettable package films that represent the bulk of the 1940s output. These six films, starting with 1943s Saludos Amigos and culminating with the 1949 film Ichabod & Mr. Toad, were cheaply produced (at least compared to Fantasia and Bambi) as a response to the wartime limitations on the international market. They were unambitious productions, in some ways little more than loose collections of short films that might otherwise have made good Silly Symphonies. Alice and the other films of the 1950s formed part of a silver age at Disney and the studio went on to produce a steady string of hits over the next thirty-odd years until their dominance was temporarily halted again in the mid-80s.
Alice was an important film for Disney and survives in as one of the studios most iconic pictures. Lewis Carrolls characters, like those of A.A Milne, are now for better or worse permanently wedded to Disney in the popular imagination. Yet the film itself has fared less well than others of that era as a piece of entertainment. If you had to pinpoint one thing that defines classic Disney then that would be pacing, and Alice suffers in this regard as a result of the episodic nature of the original story. Especially when compared to near contemporary offerings such as Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp. There isnt much of a narrative through-line to drive the film and it suffers from this. And whilst Alice in Wonderland has (according to one of the documentary features) more songs than any other Disney film to this day, youd be hard pressed to remember many of them. The ones that do linger in the memory, such as Im Late and The Unbirthday Song, are little ditties rather than fully formed songs. Instead the film flitters between unconnected and fairly short scenes in which the books greatest strengths - Carrolls witty wordplay and his satirical edge take a back seat to cute visuals and slapstick comic business.
Alice in Wonderland doesnt have the ambition and artistic cohesion of the much more auteured Sleeping Beauty and it lacks the storytelling economy of Dumbo, but the wealth of artistic talent at Walts disposal at least ensures that the animation is fluid and detailed. The ensemble of great comic voice actors, such as Sterling Holloway as the Cheshire Cat and Richard Haydn as the Caterpillar, also does much to add colour to an oddly subdued Disney film. It certainly tries to be zany, but the formally experimental elements of Fantasia and Dumbo not to mention the short Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom released only two years later are really only felt in the sequence which sees the arrival of the Queen of Hearts playing card soldiers. Lewis Carrolls unique and anarchic childrens book deserved to be represented by similarly free-form animation.
Extras
As mentioned, the brilliant Cine-Explore treatment is missing on Alice and there isnt a commentary as such. However there is at least a documentary feature which runs alongside the film and sees talking heads like Disney historian Brian Sibley comment on the making of the movie in picture-in-picture format. Concept art and other relevant materials (such as clips of live action reference footage recorded using the voice actors) are also shown at times and enhance what might otherwise be a bland talking heads documentary. It is a nice feature to have and kept me from feeling totally let down by the feature set, but it still pales in comparison to the commentaries on Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio and Beauty and the Beast. Most of the features are standard definition and carried over from the last DVD release of the film. These include trailers, two Walt Disney introductions (from when the film was shown on US television) and the aforementioned live action reference footage. There is also some sort of interactive game (Disney are fond of these on DVD and Blu-ray), though who actually plays these is anyones guess. You might say they are for children, but youd be hard pressed to find a modern child who has access to a Blu-ray player and doesnt have at least one games console (and possibly a mobile phone) capable of infinitely more satisfying video games than those on offer here. Im not knocking the inclusion of this feature though. The more features the better and Disney, to their credit, certainly try to provide something for everyone with these releases. Some of the documentaries are quite in-depth, whereas other features are more clearly aimed as a more casual audience. Then there are almost always short films (the Alice-influenced 1936 Mickey Mouse short Thru the Mirror is included here) and, as mentioned, the games. Its a comprehensive package that is far above the average for either DVD or Blu-ray. If I sound disappointed at all it is only because of the superior work done on the some of the other discs Ive mentioned. Alice in Wonderland is available
on Blu-ray now.