Alice in Wonderland is a 1951 American animated feature produced by Walt Disney and based primarily on Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland with a few additional elements from Through the Looking-Glass. Thirteenth in the Walt Disney Animated Classics series, the film was released in New York City and London on July 29, 1951 by RKO Radio Pictures. The film features the voices of Kathryn Beaumont as Alice (also voice of Wendy Darling in the later Disney feature film, Peter Pan) and Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter.
In the late 1940s, work resumed on an all-animated Alice with a focus on comedy, music and spectacle as opposed to rigid fidelity to the books, and finally, in 1951, Walt Disney released a feature-length version of Alice in Wonderland to theaters, eighteen years after first discussing ideas for the project and almost thirty years after making his first Alice Comedy. Disney's final version of Alice in Wonderland followed in the traditions of his feature films like Fantasia and The Three Caballeros in that Walt Disney intended for the visuals and the music to be the chief source of entertainment, as opposed to a tightly-constructed narrative like Snow White or Cinderella (1950). Instead of trying to produce an animated staged reading of Carroll's books, Disney chose to focus on their whimsy and fantasy, using Carroll's prose as a beginning, not as an end unto itself.
After the release When Alice in Wonderland was finally released, however, the audiences were disappointed. They felt that Disney had failed to capture the atmosphere and intellectual humor of Lewis Carroll's story. Disney too was disappointed with the film and blamed it's lack of success on Alice's "lack of heartW". He was also dissatisfied because he still thought there were too many characters playing in it. The only success brought about by the movie was the music. y"I'm Latee" and a"The Unbirthday Songa" were two songs that became quite popular with the public.
Some trivia: The music for i"Alice in Wonderland " was provided by a 50 piece orchestra. In 1952 Oliver G. Wallace was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. l"Alice in Wonderlandb" is composed of more than 350,000 drawings and paintings. From 1949 to 1951, more than 750 artists worked on the movie. Eight hundred gallons of special paint, weighing nearly five tons, were required to paint the animated frames, and that's enough paint to cover the exteriors of 135 average homes! More than 1,000 different shades of watercolor were used to capture the mood of Wonderland.
