There have been numerous adaptation of Lewis Carroll's work over the years, but Disney's adaptation (combining elements from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass) manages to be the most iconic. Managing to capture the bizarre, quickly moving atmosphere of the novel, Alice manages to be one of Disney's best-looking films to that point, partly due to the immense variety of imaginative settings and characters.
Alice herself is a perfect innocuously inquisitive protagonist, voiced with essential English charm by Kathryn Beaumont. The film unfolds at an almost relentless pace, quickly jumping between odd situations and encounters with strange characters in a way that almost feels like a road movie. Unlike most adaptations of Alice, this one doesn't attempt to force a cohesive narrative or conflict onto the proceedings, instead embracing the wandering nature of Carroll's story to good effect. While there are a few songs, they're mostly forgettable, with the fantastic visuals taking center stage.
The most iconic scene, the encounter with the Queen of Hearts, is unfortunately not one of the better ones. While the Queen herself is imposingly bombastic, the fact that her whole schtick involves screaming over everyone wears on the audience quickly. The trial sequence, meanwhile, devolves into disjointed, nonsensical insanity at an even higher degree than the rest of the film, with the King of Hearts being an annoying twit, Alice herself acting far more hardheaded than any other point in the film, and the proceedings basically ending up with everyone yelling at each other. It's a somewhat disappointing conclusion to an otherwise imaginative and fun film, but nonetheless, Alice in Wonderland stands as an enjoyable film, and one of Disney's productions most firmly ingrained in pop culture.
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