Alice’s Adventures in Gainedderland predates the invention of cinema by a couple of a long time. Neverthemuch less, very like the “Drink me” bottle and “Eat me” predespatcheded to its younger professionaltagonist, Lewis Automotiveroll’s fantastical story has referred to as out the identical message to generations of moviemakers world wide: “Adapt me.” This century, although not even a quarter of the way in which over, has already introduced us full-length Alice films (to say nothing of television professionalductions) from Europe, South America, and naturally the United States. These final embody sepafee adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Gainedderland and its sequel Alice Via the Looking Glass by no much less an auteur than Tim Burton.
Each of these books had been additionally taken on by a writer-director named W. W. Younger greater than a century in the past, although he simply combined portions of each novels right into a single feature. You may watch this silent Alice in Gainedderland from 1915 above, in a version its uploader calls “by far the excessiveest quality version of this movie on the interinternet,” assembled “primarily from two prints scanned by the Library of Congress, together with a number of other sources.
Enhanced with “scene-by-scene picture stabilization,” it additionally excises “many title playing cards which weren’t a part of the original movie” added to subsequent versions, “and which slowed down the movie considerably.”
Running just below an hour, this reconstruction contains scenes with such broadly recognized characters because the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the Mock Turtle and the Queen of Hearts. Younger’s footage of such figures as Tweedledee and Tweedledum and Humpty Dumpty has, alas, been misplaced to time. Nonetheless, unusually for a movie adaptation, this version contains a lot of Automotiveroll’s parodic poem “You Are Outdated, Father William” — extra, even, than made it into Disney’s beloved animated feature of 1951. With its stiff costumes (primarily based on the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel) and Lengthy Island againdrops, Alice in Gainedderland could not boast fairly the identical professionalduction value, however watching it now, lengthy after the silent period, one can’t assist however really feel transported to another actuality altogether.
Related content:
The First-Ever Movie Version of Lewis Carroll’s Story Alice in Gainedderland (1903)
Alice’s Adventures in Gainedderland Learn by Sir John Gielgud
When Aldous Huxley Wrote a Script for Disney’s Alice in Gainedderland
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video sequence The Metropolis in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee-book.
