The animation of Alice in Wonderland presented the most formidable problems we have ever faced in translating a literary classic into the cartoon medium. We became aware of these problems at the very first of our staff conferences. Our experience with Cinderella, Pinocchio, Bambi, Uncle Remus and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs provided few precedents. There aren't many masterpieces of logical nonsense in the world, and none that even remotely approach Lewis Carroll's classic.
First of all, Carroll told the stories in Alice in Wonderland and in Through the Looking Glass to real children, as he picniced with them, "all on a golden afternoon," in the environs at Oxford, where he lectured on mathematics. (His real name was the Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.) And he was interested more in ideas and fantasy, and their intermingling, than in the rules of suspense and story structure.
Second, there are some eighty characters – semi-human, semi-animal, or both – in the two Alice books. They move in and out of the narrative very erratically indeed. They ignore, in their relation to Alice, every law of the theatre.
Third, time is more important to the teller of tales on the screen than it was to Lewis Carroll when he was entertaining Alice Liddell and her little friends, or than it has been to adults who have read the Alice books to their children or themselves for the last 85 years. Playing time in movie theatres is fairly definitely fixed to 80 or 90 minutes. And for a feature with an appeal to children, it should be a little less.
These were our three fundamental problems. I will explain how we solved them, and then conclude by explaining how we solved the subsidiary problems.
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