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Erin and Matt are big fans of Tim Burton’s Alice of Wonderland. How big? Big enough to theme their wedding after the film. Even if you weren’t a big fan of the movie yourself (or if you find it strange that Alice is marrying the Hatter), it’s still easy to appreciate the amazing level of details incorporated into the occasion.
Link Via The Mary Sue
Taking a cue from such classics as Alice In Wonderland and Jack and the Beanstalk, photographer Jean-Francois Fortou places normal sized people in giant or tiny sets to create a sense of wonder and dimensional irregularity.
The photos are simple and digitally untouched, and their simplicity is the key to making the whole concept work, I mean, how easy would it be to use Photoshop to simply shrink the subjects?
But that wouldn’t look as cool as setting a normal sized man inside a tiny dollhouse then snapping away as he curls up in a ball, covered in tiny furniture, now would it?
–image via Jean-Francois Fortou –via Flavorwire
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Self proclaimed Gonzo Illustrator Ralph Steadman decided to take on Alice in Wonderland in 1967, and he brought his usual flair for warped character designs and messy style to Alice’s fantastic world. The oddity of Steadman’s style seems like normalcy when related to Wonderland.
There’s a great gallery of images at the article link below, including another Lewis Carroll work Steadman brought to life with his illustrations called “The Hunting Of The Snark”.
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Photographer Dennis Ziliotto is a great artist and these surreal shots featured on BuzzFeed, inspired by Alice In Wonderland, are simply stunning.
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Tired of a ho-hum climbing wall? Check out this whimsical climbing wall at the ILLOIHA fitness club in Japan, as designed by architecture design firm Nendo. It looks straight out of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland!
Toxel has the pics: Link
I don’t know about you guys, but I would certainly want to go see this. For more funny Star Wars mash up posters, check out the Geeks Are Sexy article at the link.
Comments Off Here is a Disney Studios reference test film synched with the finished scene from the 1951 film Alice in Wonderland. You also see the animators at work, capturing the mood and the movements of the actors. -via The Daily What
While I love geeky art, I think my favorite form of these works has always been mashups between two great sources. BuzzFeed has a great collection of such pieces, including this picture of Darth Valice in Wonderland by DeviantArt user Thumper-001.
(YouTube link) (Original video source/Nico)
Take a 150-year-old British story, soak it in the culture of cute Japanese anime, and run it through the technology of Vocaloid audio recording and animation software, and you end up with a cartoon production that resembles a Broadway musical! -Thanks, Daniel!
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These intricately-designed high heels might not be the most functional shoes in the world, but they are certainly eye-catching and fun. Would any of you fashion-forward neatonaut ladies wear these or do they look too hard to walk around in?
Oddee has a variety of other items inspired by Alice in Wonderland at the link.
Disney has commissioned Southern California native artist NOAH to work his airbrush magic on a painting for their upcoming D23 Expo, which will feature movies celebrating an anniversary this year, like 101 Dalmatians and Alice In Wonderland. This illuminating video shows the master at work on the classic Disney inspired painting featuring a realistic portrait of Walt and a ‘toony Sorcerer Mickey causing lots of colorful trouble. Link
Alice in Wonderland White Rabbit - $11.95
Easter is this Sunday! Are you still looking for that perfect plush bunny? Check out the Alice in Wonderland White Rabbit from the NeatoShop!
Chase this rabbit’s link and he will lead you to the whole adorable Alice in Wonderland Plush Set.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fun Plush Toys!
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Shake Me Salt & Pepper Shakers – $29.95
"Shake Me" is a set of gorgeous ceramic salt and pepper shakers inspired by the classic story Alice in Wonderland (get the name now?). Check it out over at the NeatoShop: Link | More Fun and Unusual Salt & Pepper Shakers
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Photo: Lewis Carroll / Getty Images
Here’s a fun trivia for you for when you go see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland movie: did you know that there actually was a real alice? Her name was Alice Pleasance Lidell.
From The Real Alice in Wonderland gallery over at LIFE:
Before Alice ever set foot in Wonderland, there was Alice Liddell, the 10-year-old friend of an eccentric, stuttering lecturer in mathematics who would later find fame as a writer, under the name Lewis Carroll. (Pictured: A photo by Carroll of a 6-year-old Alice Liddell as "the Beggar-Maid" in 1858.)
With the new Alice in Wonderland making its debut recently, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit one of the old ones. It’s not the original – Alice has been made many, many times – but the Disney version is definitely one of the most well-known. Enjoy the trivia, and if you don’t, well… off with your head!
Walt Disney had already had some success with Alice in Wonderland. Combining live action and animation, Walt had a little girl named Virginia Davis star as Alice in a series of shorts called “The Alice Comedies.” From 1923 to 1927, Davis starred in 57 of these short films, including titles like “Alice’s Egg Plant,” “Alice Chops the Suey,” “Alice the Whaler” and “Alice Rattled by Rats.”
Based on this earlier success, Disney thought he might do a full-length live action-animation combo movie. When the movie was in its early stages, Mary Pickford did some color screen tests as Alice. By 1945, Disney thought he might like Ginger Rogers to star as the precocious little girl. This fell through, and by 1946, work had begun on an animated version that would have art design quite similar to the Tenniel illustrations from the original Lewis Carroll book. This version even get as far as storyboards, but Walt ended up hating it and had changed his mind back to a movie that would combine live action and animation. As you might have guessed, this idea also fell through, and by the late ‘40s, animation was started for the movie we know today.
If you love the bright colors and modern design of the movie, you have Mary Blair to thank. Blair’s distinct style can also be seen in Peter Pan, Song of the South and Cinderella. She is probably best known for art not in a movie, though – Blair is responsible for the design of the famous (or infamous) ride It’s a Small World. She also made a 90-foot mural for the Disney’s Contemporary Resort.
If you’ve read the book, you know that there were a large number of songs and poems written by Lewis Carroll that didn’t make it into the movie. But it wasn’t for lack of trying. Disney hired more than 30 songwriters to try to transform Carroll’s whimsical words to music, but it was simply impossible to cram them all into a 75-minute movie. Still, the movie boasts the most songs ever used in an animated Disney film. Because some of them are just snippets of songs, though, most people don’t really realize this.
Alice was supposed to sing a ballad called “Beyond the Laughing Sky” that would be somewhat similar to Dorothy’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t well-suited to Kathryn Beaumont’s (the voice of Alice) vocal range, though, and it seemed to drag the movie down a little. The lyrics were later changed and it was repurposed for Peter Pan under the name “Second Star to the Right.”
The movie was kind of a flop. It wasn’t a total disaster, but just like with any book-to-film adaptation, there were literary fans waiting to pounce on inaccuracies and omitted scenes they felt were vital. It wasn’t a big hit until the 1960s and ‘70s, when it became associated with drug culture. This wasn’t exactly how Walt pictured the film succeeding, but Disney eventually rolled with it – the company re-released the movie in 1974 and again in 1981.
Do the voices in the movie seem slightly familiar? If you watch a lot of Disney movies, there’s a good reason for that. Walt was loyal to his actors and would use them in multiple movies. Alice’s voice, Kathryn Beaumont, was also Wendy in Peter Pan and still provides the voices for both today (she has been featured in the Kingdom Hearts video games and in the rides at Disney Parks). Ed Wynn, the Mad Hatter, can also be seen in Mary Poppins as the giggly Uncle Albert and as the toymaker in Babes in Toyland. Sterling Holloway, the Cheshire Cat, might have found the most success with Disney, though: he was the voice of Winnie the Pooh, the voice of Roquefort in The AristoCats, Kaa in The Jungle Book, and had bit parts in Bambi, Dumbo, The Three Caballeros and Snow White.
The movie is actually a combination of two books – the original Alice in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking Glass.
Alice was originally going to encounter the Jabberwocky as she does in the books, but that scene was cut (rumor has it the beast was too scary). If you pay close attention, though, you can catch a couple of references to the creature: the Cheshire Cat sings a stanza from the poem, and there’s also an appearance by the Mome Raths, which are mentioned in the Jabberwocky poem.
So are you looking forward to the new movie? Think it can’t possibly top the original? Or are you strictly a book purist?
From the British Film Institute Archive comes this first-ever film adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s book.
Made just 37 years after Lewis Carroll wrote his novel and eight years after the birth of cinema, the adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations… With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film’s original colours for the first time in over 100 years.
If you don’t have the requisite time to view the video, you can view a summary at this tattoo.
Via Metafilter.
Tattoo artist Holly Azzara created this enormous back and arm tattoo that depicts the entire Alice in Wonderland story — well, the Disney version, anyway. Additional pictures at the link.
Link via Digg | Artist’s Website
Poor songwriters – they spend a ton of time writing and composing music for movies, only for a good chunk of their work to be cut at a later date. OK, that probably goes for most people in the movie industry, and songwriters actually have it better than most – with a key change and a tweak to the lyrics, their songs can be repurposed to fit the next big movie… or sit in a vault for 19 years to be pulled out for a television show, as the case may be. Read on!
But not all of them got included – more than 30 songs were written, including one about the Jabberwock (he ultimately got cut from the movie altogether), a song for the Caterpillar called “Dream Caravan,” a song for the Cheshire Cat called “I’m Odd,” and a song that Alice sang to open the movie called “Beyond the Laughing Sky.” Although “Dream Caravan” and “I’m Odd” never saw the light of day, you might know “Laughing Sky” by a different name – “The Second Star to the Right” from Peter Pan.
The song was cut from Alice because the song was a ballad and was a bit difficult for young Kathryn Beaumont, the voice of Alice, to sing. It was also determined that the slow song might start the movie off a little too slow, so the opening song was replaced with “In a World of My Own” instead – it’s a bit more upbeat and matched Beaumont’s range and style better.
The movie is really two shorts all rolled into one experience; “I’m a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow” appears in the very first one called “Bongo.” It’s about a bear cub who works for the circus but runs away and ends up having all kinds of adventures in the wild. What does this have to do with Jiminy Cricket, you’re probably wondering? Well, he sets up the story of Bongo by strolling through a house, singing this tune. When he gets to the record player conveniently set up in the house, he puts “Bongo” on and the first short officially starts. You’re probably familiar with the second short – “Mickey and the Beanstalk.” Fun and Fancy Free actually takes its name from a line in Jiminy’s song:
“I’m a happy-go-lucky fellow
Full of fun and fancy-free
You can make the whole world seem mellow
If you take it in your stride like me.”
Don’t feel sorry for Jiminy, by the way – although he may have had to wait seven years for this particular song, his ballad from Pinocchio, “When You Wish Upon a Star,” has been one of Disney’s signature songs ever since and was ranked #7 on the American Film Institute’s “Top Movie Songs of All Time” in 2004.
Here’s Jiminy singing “I’m a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow,” if you’re interested. The song plays throughout the opening credits, but if you want to hear him, he starts chirping around 1:47.
There was also a song for the magical compass sequence called “Bobbing Along on the Bottom of the Beautiful Briny Sea” that was later shortened to “The Beautiful Briny” for Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
If it seems like a lot of Mary Poppins songs were repurposed, that’s because they were – the Sherman Brothers once laughingly refused to say what else they had reworked from the movie, saying that people would think all they had done for the past 10 years was shuffle songs around.
Urlesque has a post full of mashups of Disney animated movie trailers, such as the above mix of Sin City with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, as well as Kill Bill with Beauty and the Beast, and Pulp Fiction with Alice in Wonderland.
Nick Bertke has created this unexpectedly hypnotic electronic music video remixed from sounds recorded from the Disney film “Alice in Wonderland”: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] – via A Welsh View
Let’s see if YOU can figure out the lyrics!
Update 2/10/10 – New YouTube embeds as Nick had converted his old ones to private viewing only.
