How I Cartooned "Alice", por Walt Disney (1951)

 

 

En mayo de 1951, la revista Films in Review (la cual, fundada en 1909 y todavía en publicación, es la revista de cine más antigua de Estados Unidos) publicó un artículo titulado "How I cartooned 'Alice': Its Logical Nonsense needed a Logical Sequence" ("Cómo convertí 'Alicia' en dibujos animados: su absurdo lógico necesitaba una secuencia lógica"), acerca de la aún no estrenada Alicia en el País de las Maravillas de la compañía Disney. El texto lleva el nombre de Walt Disney, aunque se piensa que pudo haberlo escrito uno de los directores de animación a partir de observaciones y comentarios de Walt, y presenta algunas particularidades, como mencionar que la Reina de Corazones es una amalgama de "las cuatro reinas" (entre los dos libros de Alicia solo hay tres reinas, sin contar a la propia Alicia cuando es coronada), y terminar de manera abrupta mientras comenta la selección de Kathryn Beaumont como la voz de Alicia.

 

 

No he localizado mucha información sobre este artículo. Solo he visto unas pocos sitios de internet con las páginas de la revista escaneadas a partir de la copia de una biblioteca, y no parece estar digitalizado (¿todavía?) en los archivos de la revista Films in Review. Sin embargo, he observado que en varias fuentes oficiales de Disney se reproducen frases del texto como citas de Walt Disney, por lo que en principio no hay motivo, a pesar de parecer incompleto, para dudar de su legitimidad.

 

Como no he encontrado ningún sitio donde el texto aparezca más que en el escaneado de la revista, lo transcribo aquí para una lectura más cómoda. Incluyo los escaneados de las portada, el índice y las tres páginas del artículo, y dos capturas de las imágenes de la película parecidas a las que publicaba la revista, con su pie de foto correspondiente.

 

How I Cartooned "Alice"
Its Logical Nonsense Needed a Logical Sequence

BY WALT DISNEY

 

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 of them 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.

 

An average reader can read the two Alice books in from twelve to fourteen hours. Even a fast reader couldn't read them in less than six or seven hours. Merely to introduce the eighty odd "characters", giving a minute to each, would have consumed the entire time alloted to our movie.

 

 

So we combined a few characters, rearranged some episodes, condensed some dialogue. Keeping, we believe, the Carroll flavor.

 

A good example of how we worked our problems out is the way we animated the famous Tea Party. We have the Mad Hatter and the March Hare chant the "Unbirthday" lines which Humpty- Dumpty spoke in his colloquy with Alice in Trough the Looking- Glass. The Tea Party is a perfectly appropriate occasion, and we thus eliminated Humpty- Dumpty, which we wanted to do for another reason I'll refer to later.

 

 

Disney's tea party differs from Carroll's.

©Disney, 1951.

 

Another example is the way we shifted the reading of the dry history lesson from its original context in the Caucus Race, to the opening scene of our picture. Putting it there gives more coherence to all that follows, since it puts the reason for Alice's descent into the rabbit hole where it is most effective dramatically, i.e., at the beginning. And no violence is done to Carroll's mood, nor to any of the character relationships.

 

But before we did any of this, we tried out any episode in both Alice books ion our own test audience of some 500 persons. 

 

It was imperative that we create a plot structure, for Carroll had not had need for such a thing. We decided, of course, that Alice's curiosity was the only possible prime mover for our story and generator and generator of the necessary suspense. The result is a basic chase pattern that culminates when Alice, after her strange adventures, returns to the world of reality.

 

Some people told us that because the Alice books are pure fantasy the basic laws of story progression need not apply. We answered that when you look at a moving picture you do not have a chance to ponder over the meaning, or to re-read. We believe that our picture, which runs 75 minutes and has thirty-five of the eighty or so original characters, animated singly, or in groups, or with Alice, will prove we were right in evolving a plot that unified essentially quite disparate episodes.

 

There are many characters in the two Alice books that antagonized, repelled, or confused the little girl, and have similarly affected even the most steadfast of Alice's admirers. Some were pretty callous, and several were depressingly lugubrious. The child that turns into a pig in Alice's arms, for example, was revolting, according to one of our early tests. Other tests indicated that the sad and weepy Mock Turtle and Gryphon were without other compensating interest.

 

Humpty-Dumpty was not used because he was too talky. Moreover, he wasn't even a Carroll creation, but a nursery rhyme symbol, and a cartoon cliché in British politics.

 

We combined the four Queens and the Duchess into one figure, the raucous Queen of Hearts, who keeps demanding more decapitations. Many minor figures, casually alluded to, were not inclueded in ever our first muster, for reasons that must by now be clear.

 

We created one new character. He is the personified Doorknob, who guards the precints of Wonderland. He was invented in order to avoid a long explanatory monologue at the beginning of the story and to give Alice a foil to talk to. The Doorknob has been approved, incidentally, by some of the strictest Alice purists in England.

 

I am not finding fault with the way Lewis Carroll told his immortal nonsense. If I hadn't regarded it as one of the masterpieces of all time, for both adults and children, I would not have undertaken a film version. I undertook it with greatest respect.

 

Now practically every literate person in the Western World has a personal idea of the way Alice and all the semi-animal and semi-human beings Carroll created, should look. The appearances of the Mad Hatter and the Carpenter, the Walrus and the Dodo, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the White Rabbit, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar and the whole Carroll brood are very definitely conceived in the minds of millions of children and grown-ups. These images, of course, derive from the Tenniel illustrations.

 

 

It is not easy technically, to turn book illustrations into animated cartoons, and the cross-hatched etchings of Tenniel could not be animated just as they are. They had to be re-done in clean pen line and in the brilliant hues that Technicolor can reproduce. They had to seem round, not flat. They had to be made mobile by the illusionary processes of animation. They had to be seen in a life-like flow of action from various angles. For the cartoon medium, the characters virtually had to be born anew, since their behavior would have to be conveyed in movement, rather than with words and pen-and-ink drawings.

 

And yet, I think we have managed to  follow Tenniel in such close detail that no one can say our delineations distort the images that Carroll and Tenniel worked out together.

 

But there are some slight deviations.

 

The features of our Alice are somehow more youthful that those of the Victorian maid depicted by the great cartoonist of Punch. We have made her figure less stubby. Her hair is more kempt in our portrait. Though her costume is little changed, the stockings in our Alice are plain instead of stripped, in order to save time devoted to drawing and for reasons related to Technicolor. We are somewhat less realistic than Tenniel in portraying some of the animal characters. We have made the features of the Walrus more human, for example. Our March Hare is more humanesque, and so is our White Rabbit.

 

But I want to reassure the devotees of Lewis Carroll that we have not changed the essential meaning and mood of the book or the Tenniel illustrations.

 

Our final problem derived from the fact that Alice and all the other Carroll creations would have to speak.  

Voices and music are almost as important in animated cartoons as are the drawings themselves. As a matter of fact, voices key the animation, and precede the drawings, so that the animation can be timed and adjusted to the spoken words. And voices for fantasy, and for the characters of fantasy, require a very creative kind of casting indeed. There was one further complication: the necessity, for the purpose of engendering mood, of authentic British inflections.

Who could speak for the Mad Hatter better then Ed Wynn? Or for the frantic March Hare better than Jerry Colonna? Their voices arouse the very spirit of Carroll's whimsy. We were fortunate to find them available. And we were fortunate to find Richard haydn for the caustic Caterpillar; Sterling Holloway for the acrobatic Cheshire Cat; Bill Thompson for the elusive White Rabbit; Verna Felton for the raucous Queen of Hearts; Pat O'Mailley for the Walrus and the Carpenter and the Tweedle twins; Heather Angel for Alice's elder sister; and Queenie Leonard for the flowers in the beautiful garden scene.

 

 

Disney made them more than a pack of cards.

©Disney, 1951.

Of paramount importance, of course, was the voice for Alice. It was essential that it please English- speaking people everywhere. Our whole project largely depended on finding the voice that would give our animation of Alice warm and vibrating life. We found it, after scoring hundreds of young American and British-born actresses, in the voice of Kathryn Beaumont. She is British-born, thirteen years old, and keenly perceptive of all that Alice means. Her voice was considered pleasing and flawless by all who heard it during the rehearsals and the recordings.

 

Kathy had appeared briefly in one movie in London and came to this country with her mother by way of Canada. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer put her under a term pact, and she had had one role at that studio. We discovered her there. 

 

Fuentes:

 

Artículo escaneado en Vintage Disney Alice.

 

Films in Review, mayo de 1951, número 2.5, págs. 7-11.