I want to write about the latest addition to my rather extensive collection of Alice In Wonderland books, but first of all you need a bit of background because not everybody is quite as obsessive as I am about Alice In Wonderland.
I don't think there is any doubt at all that the most famous screen version of Alice is the Disney animation. There are other versions that I like better and other animations that I think show more imagination but it's undeniable that the Disney version is by far the best-known.
It is a true classic of children's film making and one of the best loved pieces ever created by the Disney studios. I have a couple of DVDs of it and between them the soundtracks are available in no less than a dozen languages. It's popular.
Now the studio have released a book. This is, you may say, nothing new. There are dozens of editions featuring stills from the movie already. There are none like this one though!
This one collects the art of Mary Blair and adds new text by Jon Scieszka. Mary Blair was a conceptual artist for the Disney studios who worked on such features as Cinderella, Peter Pan and, of course, Alice In Wonderland. The job of a conceptual artist is to create the look of the film before the animators get to work. This edition of the book collects together her artwork and an intriguing piece of work it is too.
Many of the illustrations are familiar from the finished product - The Walrus ushering the oysters along the beach, the garden of live flowers, the card guardsmen chasing Alice around a maze, the Queen of Hearts. All of them are strikingly similar to the film. However there are also striking differences. Blair's concepts were a little darker and a little more surreal. Her Alice is less consistently rendered and not such a conventionally pretty young girl. I have never been the whole-hearted fan of the Disney version that others often are. It seems rather too bright and twee and sentimental to me. (And what would have been wrong with using Carroll's songs, eh? Answer me that.) Had the studio embraced completely the look that this conceptual art had we would have seen a very different animation, darker and more sinister and altogether stranger. I have little doubt that it wouldn't have been a success, not everyone shares my particular tastes in art. Nevertheless it's great to have this edition as it shows an Alice of an alternate, and rather more nightmarish reality.
So what about the text in this new version. To begin with, there is very little of it. The general presentation of the book is rather good with a full page illustration opposite a page with text. These text pages rarely run to more than a single short paragraph and in some cases have as few as twenty to thirty words. In one case only four words! I have other versions with even fewer but they have been specifically abridged for very young children. This edition will, I think, appeal more to collectors - both of Alice and of Disney.
Is the text any good though? Actually, for what it is, it isn't bad. It owes very little to Carroll but that's OK for it hardly owes more to Disney. Instead Scieszka has very much put his own mark on it. It reuses some Carrol jokes and some Disney ones and adds some new ones and occasionally veers off in the general direction of an Abbot and Costello routine but on the whole does a fine job of accompanying the pictures - and make no mistake, the pictures are the important bit here.
So the final verdict? It's not my favourite illustrated edition but that's OK, it's not my favourite film version either. It is pretty good though and the novelty of seeing these pictures in print counts for a lot. The only real gripe, as I mentioned before, is the lack of Lewis Carrol's name on the cover.
(Incidentally I had a similar gripe many years ago when I hired from my local video library the film of the Tempest version that stars Toyah Willcox as Ophelia. It had on the cover in very large letters "DEREK JARMAN'S The Tempest" and in considerably smaller letters by William Shakespeare.)
I don't think there is any doubt at all that the most famous screen version of Alice is the Disney animation. There are other versions that I like better and other animations that I think show more imagination but it's undeniable that the Disney version is by far the best-known.
It is a true classic of children's film making and one of the best loved pieces ever created by the Disney studios. I have a couple of DVDs of it and between them the soundtracks are available in no less than a dozen languages. It's popular.
Now the studio have released a book. This is, you may say, nothing new. There are dozens of editions featuring stills from the movie already. There are none like this one though!
This one collects the art of Mary Blair and adds new text by Jon Scieszka. Mary Blair was a conceptual artist for the Disney studios who worked on such features as Cinderella, Peter Pan and, of course, Alice In Wonderland. The job of a conceptual artist is to create the look of the film before the animators get to work. This edition of the book collects together her artwork and an intriguing piece of work it is too.
Many of the illustrations are familiar from the finished product - The Walrus ushering the oysters along the beach, the garden of live flowers, the card guardsmen chasing Alice around a maze, the Queen of Hearts. All of them are strikingly similar to the film. However there are also striking differences. Blair's concepts were a little darker and a little more surreal. Her Alice is less consistently rendered and not such a conventionally pretty young girl. I have never been the whole-hearted fan of the Disney version that others often are. It seems rather too bright and twee and sentimental to me. (And what would have been wrong with using Carroll's songs, eh? Answer me that.) Had the studio embraced completely the look that this conceptual art had we would have seen a very different animation, darker and more sinister and altogether stranger. I have little doubt that it wouldn't have been a success, not everyone shares my particular tastes in art. Nevertheless it's great to have this edition as it shows an Alice of an alternate, and rather more nightmarish reality.
So what about the text in this new version. To begin with, there is very little of it. The general presentation of the book is rather good with a full page illustration opposite a page with text. These text pages rarely run to more than a single short paragraph and in some cases have as few as twenty to thirty words. In one case only four words! I have other versions with even fewer but they have been specifically abridged for very young children. This edition will, I think, appeal more to collectors - both of Alice and of Disney.
Is the text any good though? Actually, for what it is, it isn't bad. It owes very little to Carroll but that's OK for it hardly owes more to Disney. Instead Scieszka has very much put his own mark on it. It reuses some Carrol jokes and some Disney ones and adds some new ones and occasionally veers off in the general direction of an Abbot and Costello routine but on the whole does a fine job of accompanying the pictures - and make no mistake, the pictures are the important bit here.
So the final verdict? It's not my favourite illustrated edition but that's OK, it's not my favourite film version either. It is pretty good though and the novelty of seeing these pictures in print counts for a lot. The only real gripe, as I mentioned before, is the lack of Lewis Carrol's name on the cover.
(Incidentally I had a similar gripe many years ago when I hired from my local video library the film of the Tempest version that stars Toyah Willcox as Ophelia. It had on the cover in very large letters "DEREK JARMAN'S The Tempest" and in considerably smaller letters by William Shakespeare.)
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