Why “Alice in Wonderland” Is So Hard To Adapt?

‘Wonderland’

by Ashley Griffin, ashleygriffinofficial.com

“Alice in Wonderland”, and its sequel “Alice Through The Looking Glass”, are beloved literary classics. Written in the mid-1800s by Lewis Carroll (ne: Charles Dodgson) they are two of the most adapted stories of all time having numerous film, play, musical, television show (and other) incarnations from the first 1886 theatrical version, to American McGee’s dark video game retelling.

The story of Alice, an inquisitive young Victorian girl getting lost in the zany world of Wonderland should be simple to tell. And yet, it’s probably the most unsuccessfully adapted tale ever, consistently inspiring projects whose only common thread is that they completely miss the mark – and this includes versions that are literally word-for-word incarnations of the books. I personally might go so far as to say (though many may disagree) that Disney’s original animated adaptation (and possibly the largely stop motion 1988 Czech film “Neco z Alenky”)  are the only successful true adaptations of the story, with wild reimagining’s like American McGee’s “Alice,” and “Dreamchild” generally faring much better as creative works.

Why?

“Alice in Wonderland” (and “…Through the Looking Glass”, though for expediency's sake I’ll refer to them both as “Wonderland”) are works of surrealism.

According to the Tate Modern, surrealism “balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams.” Basically, surrealist works whether books, visual art, film or another medium, exist one step further than “magical realism,” and are fully in the same realm as dream logic. And dream logic is one of the most difficult things to create successfully in the waking world.

Think about your own dreams. They’re very much focused on how you FEEL. Often if you remember a particularly potent dream after waking up, your primary memory of it will be the emotions. You might say something like: “It was terrifying! I was on a boat captained by monkeys, and I wouldn’t eat any bananas!”

Once you say those events out loud, they sound ridiculous. There’s a dichotomy between the actual events of the dream, and how they made you feel when you were experiencing them. And you can’t get someone else to feel (or sometimes even understand) those emotions simply by relating what actually happened in the dream, the way you might be able to by explaining certain real-life events.

Dreams also require acceptance of things a waking mind would instantly question. How did you get on the boat? (I don’t know…I was just there…) Why was it so important that you eat the bananas? How did monkeys come to captain this boat? Etc.

Creating a successful surrealist work is one of the most difficult things an artist can do…because you’re working within a catch-22. They must get an audience to feel deep emotions that connect to the part of their psyche that resonates with the symbolic, metaphoric and subtextual…but they must use the literal and the rational in order to do it.

“Alice in Wonderland” is a perfect example of how this can go awry and is a brilliant lesson on why form matters so much when analyzing what function your story needs to fulfill.

The “Wonderland” books were written by Carroll at the request of his real life inspiration – Alice Liddell. The Liddell sisters (Lorina, Alice and Edith) were the children of Dean Liddell – an Oxford Dean who Carroll worked with. There is quite a lot of controversy surrounding Carroll’s relationship with children in general, the Liddell sisters in particular, and Alice especially. But what everyone can agree on is that Carroll had a close relationship with the girls and used to take them on outings – especially rowboat expeditions where he would makeup stories for them. Alice liked them so much that she asked Carroll to write them down, and he did.

Many of the things he included in the stories were metaphors. From real-world people –the Queen of Hearts being a stand-in for Queen Victoria, the Dodo in the Caucus Race being a representation of Carroll (Carroll’s real last name, as I’ve noted, was Dodgson and he had a terrible stutter, often pronouncing his last name as Do-Do-Dodgson), To events in the stories which related both to England at large, and the Liddell girls particularly. The Caucus Race was a metaphor for the ineffectualness of Parliament, the three sisters down the treacle well in the Mad Tea Party (Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie) were stand-ins for the Liddell Sisters (Elsie, pronounced LC = a representation of Lorina (her middle name was Charlotte), Lacie = an anagram of Alice, Tillie = the nickname for Edith.) The references could fill a book, and indeed they do. Several. Carroll knew exactly what he was doing with the stories, making them meaningful for both adults and children in general, and his coworkers and the Liddell girls specifically.

But because of all of this, when reading the stories, you very much get the sense of being in a surrealist world. Things have both logic and no logic. There are major stakes, and yet the rules of the earth seem to not work quite the same way as they do for you and me. If you explain the actual plot: (“It was terrifying! First I fell down a rabbit hole, then I shrunk, then I met a talking cat, then The Queen of Hearts was going to have all the playing cards chop off my head!”), it starts to melt away the same way a dream does in the light of day…and yet we all feel exactly what Alice felt when the cards were after her. We realize the illogic, and yet we still feel profoundly deeply.

Now, let’s adapt that for film or the stage.

Once you have real people acting out the story, you add a whole other layer of literalness onto it that takes “Wonderland” to another, not entirely welcome, place. And adaptors have tended to take one of two routes when trying to figure out how to correct for this. They either:

-      Execute everything verbatim from the book or…

-      They try to insert some sort of narrative into the story since, at its heart, “Wonderland” is a series of events, not a narrative in the way we typically understand that idea.

The verbatim adaptations become either unbelievably boring (it becomes quite tedious to watch people (or a person and costumed people/puppet creatures) sitting and conversing using tricky turns of phrases as if they were having a chat about the weather over tea for two or more hours…) or absolutely terrifying – when you take some of the incidents in the story and make them literal with real people (say, the Duchess and her Cook abusing and almost murdering an infant…), it becomes a waking nightmare.

But trying to insert a narrative makes “Wonderland,” well…not “Wonderland” at all. This is a world ruled by abstract, or even il – logic. It simply cannot function when you try to have your cake and eat it too by having characters both be completely illogical and conforming to a logical story narrative. Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” is a great example of this. Burton took the “wonder” out of “Wonderland” by giving us a generic fantasy plot about a “chosen one” needing to liberate a magical world from a tyrannical ruler, dressed up with “Wonderland” characters we recognize. His “Looking Glass” fares just as poorly, giving us a time travel narrative where Alice must make the Hatter “feel better” about his relationship with his parents. You could argue that these adaptations belongs in the “spin-off” category (since this follows an older Alice returning to Wonderland,) but they advertise themselves as live action adaptations of the original stories, and so we should look at them in the light of their, alleged, intention.

Ironically, if Burton wanted these narratives to work, the best thing to do would have been to remove them from the world of “Wonderland” (however loosely they were already tied to it,) and give us a unique fantasy world that, most importantly, did not exist within the bounds of surrealism. YouTuber The Nostalgia Critic does a great deep dive review of Burton’s “Wonderland”( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWH_XT6yXv8) where he points out (I think rightly) that the 1987 film “The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland” actually bears more resemblance to the heart of Carroll’s story than Burton’s film does…because the Care Bears movie works on the simple premise that Wonderland has to be saved not from a despot (and not by a chosen one,) but from someone whose evil master plan is to force logic into Wonderland. But, ironically, it is the ”Wonderland” “brand” that got this movie made in the first place. The moniker of “Wonderland” will sell tickets, leading to so many inappropriate adaptations that don’t really have any interest in “Wonderland” at all.

This dichotomy of approaches can be seen on Broadway too. Frank Wildhorn took a similar approach to Burton (albeit wildly different in its execution, so much so that it really could be put in the “spin-off” category almost as easily as the “adaptation” category) with his Broadway musical “Wonderland”. This “Wonderland” imagines a modern Alice going to Wonderland to rescue her daughter and having to reexamine her relationship to magic and childhood along the way. While there she must battle a logical, narrative driven plot involving the Hatter trying to usurp control of Wonderland and using Alice’s daughter as a pawn.

Conversely, the 1982 play adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland” starring Kate Burton took a very literal approach to the material. Also in 1982, the Public Theater production, “Alice at the Palace” starring Meryl Streep likewise took a literal approach, albeit through the directorial lens of the British music hall style.

Eva Le Gallienne, Kate Burton and Mary Louise Wilson in Alice in Wonderland: Broadway, 1982

Spin-offs of the “Wonderland” stories that use it as inspiration, but are not trying to make an actual adaptation, tend to fare better because they can examine the “Wonderland”, existing both in it and apart from it. The phenomenal 1985 film “Dreamchild”, for example, which combined live actors with some of the most terrifying creatures ever to come out of the Jim Henson Creature Shop, explored the origins of the “Alice” story. Significantly (though far from entirely) based on true events, in this film we meet an elderly Alice who is crotchety and stuffy and hasn’t thought about “Wonderland” in decades. She is forced to, however, when she is approached by a University that wants to bring her to America to celebrate the centenary of Lewis Carroll. Her begrudging acceptance forces her to look back on her childhood and the questionable (it is framed as both loving and traumatizing) relationship between her and Carroll and how, subconsciously, it has affected her entire life. The few trips we actually make INTO Wonderland are intercut between a young Alice having rather creepy (and, literally, by the book) interactions there and an older Alice confronting her demons.

Similarly, John Logan’s play “Peter and Alice” is based on the real origins of “Alice in Wonderland” and “Peter Pan” and imagines what was said at the real-life meeting between an elderly Alice Liddell and a 30-something-year-old Peter Llewelyn Davies (the real-life inspiration for the character of Peter.) In American McGee’s “Alice” video game (which has been ripped off by everything from Burton’s “Looking Glass” premise (at least, faintly and in a much lighter way,) to the “Once Upon a Time in Wonderland” spin-off T.V. show from the creators of “Once Upon a Time.” In this story (similarly to “Return to Oz,”) Alice has been locked away in a mental institution for years after watching her family killed in a fire and suffering intense psychological damage. She mentally retreats to Wonderland, now a nightmare version, which she must restore to its former state (and thus restore her mind to sanity) before it’s too late. It’s an interesting, adult twist on the tale that uses the psychology angle to easily tap into the “Wonderland” surrealism. There was even a live-action Disney television show in the ’90s, “Adventures in Wonderland” where a contemporary Alice has been given a looking glass that will let her travel back to Wonderland whenever she wanted – which she does whenever she has a challenge or problem to sort out. In this instance, the whimsical way the Wonderland characters behave offers veiled logical advice on how to solve her problem.

So, has there been a successful “straight” adaptation of the “Wonderland” book? I think so.

I think Disney’s animated adaptation hit the ball out of the park.

Why?

When Howard Ashman was first hired to write for Disney (an era that would issue in the Disney Renaissance), he gave a talk to the animators about how to write a musical…he taught them all the things that had been forgotten in the decades between Disney’s passing and the current state of the Animation department. In that talk, he commented on the similarity between musical theater and animation in that both naturally exist in heightened realities and create a suspension of disbelief right from the get-go. Animation can go one step further in that the characters (indeed, the entire world,) is not beholden to earthly rules…physics, physiology, even time itself don’t have to work the same way…and whereas certain dreamlike things from the “Wonderland” books translated onto real people becomes horrifying, in animation it can stay that one step removed…we can accept it as “real” without it being LITERALLY real. In essence, animation is perfectly poised to function with dream-like rules…

And that’s exactly what the Disney “Wonderland” animators took advantage of. Not only that, but the movie is a musical which, coincidentally, the “Wonderland” books are too…Carroll included dozens of poems and songs (some original, some twists on well-known poetry of the day) in his stories. The reason we remember “Humpty Dumpty” today is largely because of Carroll. The rhyme was popular with Victorian children, and Carroll devoted an entire chapter of “Looking Glass” to having Alice meet Humpty. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat” was a parody of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and beyond that, Disney took moments in the books and musicalized them, adding to that surreal quality. The “unbirthday” moment constitutes a few passing comments in the book - in the Disney film it is a charming (and brief) song. It is easy to accept the idea of creatures appearing and disappearing, as well as locations fading into one another, in animation. When made literal, our brains are often horrified, or nonplussed, quickly sensing the ridiculousness of the “dream logic.”

Similarly with the Czech film adaptation that combines a live actress playing Alice with slightly creepy stop-motion animation. The film reaches a beautiful surrealistic balance.

Now this isn’t to say that surrealism can’t be achieved with live performers, or on stage and film. It is, however, one of the most difficult things to pull off successfully in those mediums.

But it does appear…we might not get full-on surreal pieces from beginning to end frequently, but the technique shows up more than you would realize. Take the appearance of Connor in “Dear Evan Hansen.” Some might categorize that as “magical realism,” but, since it is only occurring in the head of Evan, I would be more inclined to put it in the “surreal” category. Likewise GrooveLily’s “Sleeping Beauty Wakes” incorporates surreal elements and Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” is one of the best examples of theatrical surrealism in recent memory.

So what makes those work?

Well, that’s a little more difficult to define. If I had to take a stab I’d say that those successes rest on the writer/director inserting small things into the narrative that might feel slightly off if you look at it too closely, but in the same way you feel slightly off when you experience déjà vu. Odd, but not like the rules of the universe aren’t working anymore. And most importantly those things are tied to significant emotional events that we have already been led into and feel invested in.

In “Eurydice” (a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice from Eurydice’s point of view…) the characters are speaking in heightened language from the word go. Orpheus and Eurydice bandy poetic word play back and forth and say things that you’re never quite sure if they really mean, or are just jokes (Orpheus insinuates that he will give Eurydice all the stars in the heavens, and many other things besides…you can dismiss it as them being silly, but the combination of the stylization of the setting and language makes you wonder if they literally mean what they say… (or, to quote Alice, is it that they say what they mean?)) We then see Eurydice’s father in the underworld attempting to send a letter to his daughter in the world above. By the time we get to a strange man luring Eurydice up to his skyrise apartment on her wedding day with a promise to give her a message from her dead father we’re fully functioning within the dreamscape of the world.

These are complex techniques that, when successful, pack a powerful punch. And we need to understand them and how to use them. Surrealism is one of the best ways to communicate certain themes and stories and, without it, it limits the stories we can successfully tell.

How would you best adapt “Alice in Wonderland” for the stage?