ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1951) **1/2 Lewis Carroll's characters lend themselves mightily to animation, and their renderings at the hands of Walt Disney studios is absolutely perfect. They look right, sound right, move right, make the right incidental sounds to some brilliant incidental music. That's the good part. The bad part is that they break out into really lame songs at regular intervals, breeze through the plot as if they're leaping from one one-liner to the next, and the film, generally lacks the mighty intrigue of the original text. Yes, I understand that some may consider it unnecessarily bad form to rant about the lack of depth of a children's cartoon but this, my friends, is inherently more than that. Giggling children could instead be learning life lessons, deep into their little psyches. That's a missed opportunity worth noting. That Carroll found insanity and the immemorial wasting of time to be the currency of political discourse shows us that (1) Carroll was observant as well as witty, and (2) nothing's changed much.
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