Alice in Wonderland

The ambition of early filmmakers trying to animate the major bits of the novel is worth an applaud. Eerie and raw. Come on, you can't get bored in 8 minutes film watched for historical value. For a better alternative just go for Svankmajer version. Next year Burton is also coming with an adaptation.

Actually pretty good fun considering how old it is and some of the effects are really ambitious. Also, the executioner (clearly a fairly young child) plays his role with gusto and venom!

Creepy. Think the White Rabbit just made me doo-doo all the way down to my shoe-uh. Eerie stuff. I'll never forget you, remarkably well-dressed White Rabbit with potbelly. For better or for worse. Loved the Cheshire Cat too. An intertitle announces: "The Cheshire Cat leads Alice to the Mad Hatter". Cut to an insert of a random housecat looking idly left and right and doing absolutely nothing. That Cheshire Cat ain't leading no one nowhere. It's just sitting and staring, Hepworth.

An impressive adaptation for its time. The attention paid to props and costuming is particularly remarkable. Mostly a curiosity, but worth checking out if you have time.

Kind of boring actually. This wonderful book needs a definitive film adaptation.

Another landmark film in the development of plot, although it's obvious constructive and driving use of editing didn't come around until Griffith started filming. It's really more funny than impressive nowadays.

This is actually pretty cool, though a little slow.

A bit difficult to understand, but very interesting to watch.

Obviously easy to pick apart now but this was probably a hell of an undertaking for early cinema. Still it is difficult to follow and not very good.

The film doesn't bother with following a real narrative, it's more just certain scenes from the book acted out with little to connect them. And they don't bother with any type of characterization but the effects are well done and impressive for the time period. The costumes are really well done as well.

Definitely a groundbreaking film; considering it's three times as long as the then current films.

There's something incredibly soothing about these older flicks. First off: everybody in it is now dead. Second, the obliviousness of those in it to our watching them, more than 100 years later, makes for an alienated viewing pespective. As if we are watching a civilization on a different planet without them knowing it. As for the film itself: I can't imagine the book not having had massive impact, or even making possible, the ideas of Freud, surrealism, etc.

the first version of ALICE IN WONDERLAND is pretty mundane, although i liked the card people.

Fun enough for the 10 or so minutes it lasts. I love Alice films for the challenges the work poses at all stages of production, and Hepworth rises to the occasion with aplomb. The highlight is a rather convincing shrinking effect, though perhaps it's aided by the rattiness of the only surviving print.

Impressive for its time, but they screwed up the pacing.

Very old film that attempts to be a silent film adaptation of a book that is to a large part based on games with words. It tries to cram the whole story into it's too short eight minute runtime (No room! No room!) and so obviously ends up very fragmented and feels more like a collection of unrelated scenes than as a coherent whole. Some individual scenes are well done and appropriately eerie yet playful, but I miss the verbal logic games of the book.

Pre-Griffith narrative short. p.s. pro tip: when you get bored with the fucking awful piano, ragtime, etc. soundtracks people pretty much invariably insist on accompany early silent shorts with, mute, and play Throbbing Gristle instead. TG goes with like fucking everything, it's amazing.

Very interesting but good only historically.

For the animation and narrative to be a bit clunky and clumsy is to be expected considered when it is made, but this is still not a very good film. It's way to short, and the narrative makes practically no sense, and the more the text boards try to make up for it, the more amateurish it looks.

Cheshire Cat sux:)