Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll

[inverarity]

One-line summary: The original much-misunderstood children's story and its darker, equally silly but less cheerful sequel.

Comments

[ascot_gavotte]

The 2010 Alice in Wonderland was pretty bad imo.

[dv8nation]

Alice is still very popular in Japan. Though it's mostly the Disney version they know from what I saw when I lived there.

My favorite Japanese take on Alice is from the Persona video games where she's this death spirit who can kill people by summoning playing card soldiers to stab them to death.

[ardys_the_ghoul]

So, which movie, if any, did you prefer? I remember the '99 version--it was made for TV, and I think everybody and their mother was in it (Whoopi Goldberg as the Chessire Cat? Really?). From what I saw, they included a lot that doesn't normally make it into movie versions--but, like most film adaptations, they tried to wring a moral out of it.

There was also a version starring the Care Bears--I remember watching it when I was a little kid. The Care Bears had to rescue the daughter of the Queen of Hearts from the Jaberwocky--which they ended up befriending in typical plucking-thorn-from-lion's-paw fashion.

[inverarity]

I have to admit I still have a soft spot for the classic Disney version, and I somewhat enjoyed the 2010 version, even though it pretty much stripped away the whole point of the original books by "modernizing" it into a typical fantasy adventure.

I liked the girl who played Alice in the 1999 version, but yes, Whoopi Goldberg as the Cheshire Cat made me wince.

[ardys_the_ghoul]

Something like that, with such a well-known character, I almost feel like a relatively unknown actor would be better, so you end up saying, "Oh, it's the Cheshire cat," not, "Hey, that's so-and-so." I mean, quite aside from the other weirdness.

I wanted to see the 2010 version, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

[fpb]

A recent view of Dodgson - argued at length a few years ago in the Times Literary Supplement, I think - is that his well-known interest in little girls was a kind of cover. In the Victorian age, an unmarried clergyman (Oxford dons were not allowed to marry until 1870, by which time Dodgson was dead) could not have a great deal of associations with women without some whisper of scandal; so Dodgson, who does seem to have had a taste for female company (apparently, too, with no shadow of sexual interest), used the little girls, it is argued, as a cover for his frienships with their mothers. The article was well argued and well documented, but I remain to be convinced. Dodgson almost certainly was not a full-scale pervert, but some of his photographs of children do have a troubling look: too many serious and knowing expressions, too many unchildlike poses (though it is true that the cameras of the time took forever to register the image and demanded a long and normally stiff pose), too many bitsof clothing vaguely loose, disarranged

P.S.:

[fpb]

I just googled "Charles Dodgson photography". Have a look and you'll see what I mean:
http://www.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&source=imghp&biw=1020&bih=504&q=charles+dodgson+photography&gbv=2&aq=1&aqi=g4&aql=&oq=%22Charles+Dod&gs_rfai=

[malinbe]

I am a huge fan of Alice. My friends and I had an obsession when we were sixteen yers old, and interrupted class to force some of our teachers to talk about the books (that they actually did it is just further proof of how amazing those stories are). BUt I haven't read the English originals yet. I read a translation (a very good one, but still) so maybe it is time I attempt to appreaciate it in its original language.

I liked the 2009 TV two-parter more than I liked the 2010 movie, but I think of them as expensive fanfiction. I enjoyed them by themselves and I didn't even try to compare them to the books. I haven't seen the Disney version since I was a child, when I remember liking it (and I did watch that one about the time when I first read the books), but I must have been around Alice's same age, seven or eight.

[inverarity]

There are so many puns and rhyming jokes in Alice, it seems like the books would be really hard to read in a language other than English. The story and the imagery could certainly be translated, but I have a hard time imagining how you would translate Jabberwocky or The Lobster Quadrille into Spanish (or any other language).

(Hee. And it seems someone else actually did a study on that topic.)

[fpb]

Well, it has been done, and while it has been a long time since I read it in Italian, I can tell you that it worked very well. The total absurdity of scenes such as the Dormouse getting stuffed into the teapot and the debate whether sentence or verdict came first or the whole Cheshire Cat thing were imprinted in my memory. The puns, of course, were lost, but the whole sense of "this has been a very strange day" remained.