Product Description

This exceptional theatrical version of Lewis Carroll's 1865 classic features a combination of live characters and puppets, created by master puppeteer Louis Bunin. The cast includes Carol Marsh as Alice along with Stephen Murray, Felix Aylmer, Ernest Milton, and Pamela Brown (in live sequences and as voices of the puppets). Directed by Dallas Bower, this lively and fun production includes some wonderful musical numbers that will be enjoyed by all ages.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18672 in DVD
• Released on: 2006-09-18
• Format: NTSC
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 83 minutes

Customer Reviews

A highly underrated, neglected classic version of "Alice."
"This wonderful film turns Lewis Carroll's book of Alice in Wonderland upside down into a claymation fantasy. Buy it now!" This review was written by my 8-year-old son, who is a huge fan of the book and everything having to do with Alice. He also loves the Disney version, but this version which came out around the same time (1950), is better, truer to the book, technically more remarkable, and has some wonderful and strange songs. Carol Marsh is a very English Alice. In short, Leonard Maltin is WRONG. This is well worth getting and seeing.

Poor technical quality
It's great to have this adaptation of Carroll's story on DVD, but the presentation is quite shoddy.

I saw this film at the National Film Theatre in London, and the audience was warned then that the best available print was in poor shape. The particular brand of film stock it was shot on was unstable, and the colour fidelity of the print shown was inconsistent. The film also suffered from some sort of chemical decay down one side of the image. These faults have been faithfully reproduced on this DVD edition.

Sadly, the DVD transfer has only compounded these problems. It's been mastered from an analogue tape source, and quite a low quality one at that (possibly U-Matic). The tracking of the playback isn't stable, and the top third of the picture suffers from chroma problems. On computer monitors, or other displays with no overscan, you can see head switching artefacts at the bottom of the screen.

In summary: this a wonderful adaptation of the story, marred by photochemical decay of the print, and further blighted by shoddy video mastering.

A more literal version of Lewis Carroll's work
While not as much of an assault on the senses as Jan Svankmejer's astounding version of Alice in Wonderland, this film should appeal to those who feel that Disney's 1951 version is too homogenized and "Disneyfied".

The puppets and stop motion effects were created by American puppeteer Louis Bunin, and are excellent.

A warning, however, is in order. The movie is book-ended by some very wooden and tedious scenes of a Lewis Carrol charactor telling stories to Alice. Also, strangely, Alice looks like she's about 25 years old.....