Malice in Wonderland (1982) by Vince Collins

While watching the new (Tim Burton’s) Alice in Wonderland today, I realized just how bizarre some of the concepts in the film are. Whether Alice is dreaming about her time in Wonderland (which kind of shows that she is probably fairly messed up in the head), or if she literally goes there by falling through the rabbit hole there are some bizarre things happening there. Personally I’m assuming she dreams about the place, and that idea is pretty strongly pushed by the happenings in the new and older films.

It occurred to me that it could be a good, and fun idea to push the bizarre storyline further, in animated form; make the whole tone of the film much more dark, because there’s certainly room for it, even if you copy the storyline directly.

Following this thought, I immediately thought of the title: Malice in Wonderland. Genius! I thought, and immediately googled the title to see if it had already been done, which, of course it had, and several times too. I must have been living under a rock for the last 23 years I swear!

One animated version stood out to me particularly, made by Vince Collins in 1982 (5 years before I was even born, that is how behind I am with this idea), here it is on youtube, but be warned it is a pretty sketchy film and contains a lot of sexual imagery: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnhYK0oi0wU

It certainly pushes the dark tone I was talking about, but only extremely loosely follows the story line of the original Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The focus of the animation seems to be more on the imagery than the story; after all, compressing the entire story into 3:52 minutes is bound to skip various (most) parts of the story. Much of the imagery in the film is very sexual, combined with the dark tone of the film gives me a very uneasy feeling while watching it, I can only imagine what Vince Collins was feeling at the time of making.

My teachers know full well how much I hate the contemporary animation that was abundant in the 80’s, though I can see the value in creating an animation based solely on imagery, which is obviously created to cause an emotional response in some way. Personally, I prefer to use animation as a platform to tell a story, or at the very least to invoke happiness, rather than nausia.