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The Failures of the Film Adaption of Carol's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"

Decent Essays

The inventive world of Wonderland and Alice’s journey in to her own imagination is more then merely a children s story. Looking deep at the symbols and structure of the story one can see that it becomes more complex and abstract as Alice gets deeper and deeper in her journey in Wonderland. Lewis Carol wrote the book in 1876 and Disney produced its own animated version of Alice in Wonderland no more then twenty years ago. The Disney production aimed at a younger audience, shows Wonderland as a very colorful and vibrant place, full of flowers, trees and a majestic garden of wonder and glory. Although Disney is successful at doing that, it fails in showing the hidden aspects of the story, the aspects of the novel that need to be dug into to …show more content…

We only see the Mad Hatter as a frenzy lunatic who can’t stop talking in the movie, but the book shows him on several occasions as calm and relaxed talking to Alice about interesting concepts.
Wonderland, which exists only in the mind of Alice and her imagination, can be analyzed in the novel as having many mathematical characteristics. It holds a much deeper meaning in the novel then it does in the movie. A part of Wonderland is laid out like a chessboard or a geometric grid and Alice in fact plays chess at one point of the novel. In the film both those aspects are left out, the film doesn’t seem to make any note of the abstract or mathematical features of Wonderland yet instead portrays it as a glorious and colorful world. It does a good job of showing the vibrant colors and atmosphere with many flowers, trees, clear blue sky, and with a very cartoon like, unrealistic look to it that appeals to most children for which the film was aimed to. However because of its inability to show the deeper side of Wonderland, the one that dealt more with mathematical and abstract concepts rather then color and nature, the film wasn’t able to bring out the setting as well as the novel.
The films weakest point comes when analyzing carefully the novel and looking for hidden messages or symbols which aren’t meant to catch the readers attention without looking deep into the story. For example,

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