Adapted from the novel by: Lewis Carroll
I've always found it harder to review animated films than real-life films. Obviously there's things like performances (the only animated film with an outstanding performance I've found is Aladdin and Robin Williams' genie). But animated films offer something different. Think mental health in Inside Out, or loneliness in Wall-E. Animated films have a power that only animation has. Alice in Wonderland is so rich with deeper meanings that one could mistake it for being a psychological drama, not a children's film. Once you read into the life of the author of the original book, Lewis Carroll, you see that this film is weird. In so many ways.
So in this quasi-review, I'll look at two interesting theories that have developed from many viewings and analyses of Alice in Wonderland. The first one is from a psychoanalytical point-of-view. This film is littered with Freudian moments and symbols. To sum up Freud's work very briefly, everything is a metaphor for sex and mothers are overbearing. With that in mind, when you look for these symbols in the film, they're everywhere. To get into Wonderland, Alice follows a rabbit into a hole. That symbolism is screaming sexuality. Unlocking the tiny door to get into Wonderland is also a sexual metaphor if I've ever seen one. These may seem accidental, but Walt Disney was one weird man, so there is every possibility that he intended this. When we see the oysters, the mother oyster is very motherly and domineering. This echoes a lot of what Freud talked about in his work The Interpretation of Dreams. The old man eating the oysters is where symbolism starts to get creepy. The original author, Lewis Carroll, had a certain "affection" for photographing children nude or semi-nude. When the old man calls the oysters "dear" before he eats them, this could well be a reference to Carroll's odd interests. Again, I don't know for certain. This is just an interpretation. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are very interesting characters to analyse in this regard. They are manifestations of how, in a dream, the "cogito" or "thinking-self" that Freud talked about is absent. Instead, it is replaced with the "id" or the part of our conscience that holds all our repressed feelings of sexuality and other dark thoughts. Tweedledee and Tweedledum are without ration and take everything that is said as gospel. Therefore, they have no cogito. As the film is all technically a dream, this is a justified viewing of the film. The film also deals with Freudian ideas of adolescence. Two flowers talk about Alice's "blossoming petals". This is a reference to puberty, something Freud discussed at length when he talked about an Oedipus Complex. Alice hunts for her identity in her dreams, trying to repress the "id" and re-discover the cogito that is present in the real world. When asked who she is, she replies "I hardly know, sir". Her search for identity is also very Freudian. The domineering Queen of Hearts is also a straight depiction of the Freudian mother. This is just one way of viewing the film.
Another way is in viewing it as a psychedelic drug trip. There is also a lot of evidence in the film for that. There are many references to "Flower Power". Now this film did pre-date the counter-culture movement of the 60s where Flower Power became a thing. Still though, it's fun to imagine that hippies saw this film while blasted on LSD and decided to name their movement after it. The psychedelic colours of the passage to Wonderland are quite trippy, so to speak. Even the name of Alice's dream world, Wonderland. It sounds like the name of a new-world festival for millennials near Lake Bled in Slovenia. Alice eats these oddly-coloured foods and she grows very tall. These foods alter her state, like drugs do to us. There are many times when characters are smoking things through pipes. One character is even sitting on mushrooms smoking hashish. I mean come on, like. This film is just like a Hunter S. Thompson novel. Again, this is just another way of viewing this film. I still haven't found a meaning for the Cheshire Cat, but that big wide-ass grin is enough to freak me out for a while after watching the film.
Anyways, you can look past all this shite and enjoy the weird animals, songs and fun world as a children's film and nothing else. There's a good chance that this could just be my warped mind reading far too much into an innocent children's films. Just one final sentiment to leave you with: Freud argued that books are interpreted the same way dreams are. Nowhere is this clearer than in Alice in Wonderland. Sorry for ruining your childhood!
By Cathal McGuinness.
