While you can see, very nearly fully formed, the primordial Internet Troll in the Cheshire Cat, it goes a bit deeper than that. It’s not terribly controversial to say that there are certain bedrocks for human interaction in the age of the internet. The shared cultural touchstone is Monty Python; people who’ve never seen Monty Python can quote large segments of it. The shared logic of the internet is that of Douglas Adams; people who’ve never read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy can still form thoughts in the same basic structure as Infinite Improbability. And in that same vein, pretty much anyone uses rhetoric strongly reminiscent of Alice.
I suppose that just means that the internet mostly speaks in rhyming nonsense logic, where nitpicks are meant to convey interest and encouragement and quoting nonsense rules then managing to simultaneously follow and subvert them is everyday behavior, but it’s more the fact everyone accepts this and can easily parse meaning from it that’s interesting.
Of course, I’ve actually read Alice in Wonderland (though not Through the Looking Glass) and… I dunno, I actually don’t remember a lot of it? There’s something about the book that slid right through my brain. But I remember thinking that the Disney version was quite true to it with the major exception of Alice’s song of self-loathing. So it might be overstating things to credit Disney too much here… but I don’t think so actually. In large part Alice in Wonderland is an animation showcase, and I think those visual cues actually help the voice of the writing come through more strongly. Or I’ve seen this movie once every few years since I was a child and can fill in large parts of both from memory so I see more stuff for an exercise like this. One of those.
Otherwise, despite being very visually driven and having a lot of colorful characters (who I get the impression were kinda name actors in their day, although thanks to Disney gravity I’m sure about half of them are best known for their Disney stuff nowadays), Alice appropriately lives or dies on Kathryn Beaumont’s performance, and I can think of few actors her age (~12 when she’d have been in the booth) I’ve seen comparable performances out of. She spends a lot of time outright talking to herself and manages a lot of nuance and personality.
It’s kinda weird Disney only cast her in one other thing, is what I’m saying. More than that though, despite being easily chopped up into smaller segments for mass consumption (I vividly remember having free Disney Channel previews and getting bits and pieces of Alice in between shows, back when it was a premium station without commercials), it has a clear emotional throughline and story progress, and almost all of that is down to Beaumont being able to inject a steady emotional drain through each segment.
I’m having trouble putting a bow on this one, in a way that’s kinda weird. A lot of my appreciation for it is purely intellectual (it’s well animated, it reflects strongly in modern culture, they got a really nuanced performance out of a very young actress) and I can’t really say I had any emotional response to it at all. So I suppose…
Rating: 7/10. I dunno, this simultaneously seems low but also I don’t feel like I can justify higher. It’s foundational and interesting but it just doesn’t stick to me in the way I usually expect these things to.
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