The 1915 ALICE IN WONDERLAND escaped my notice awhile back when I was comparing different film and teevee versions of Lewis Carroll’s book/s. It’s quite nice. Primitive, but not for 1915. Director W.W. Young has only one other credit on the IMDb, as editor of a 1930 lecture-film on Darwinian evolution, but I’m sure he must have done plenty more.
The Tenniel-inspired costumes are great. You need good visuals if you’re making a silent version of a book where all the humour is verbal. The few visual bits with potential for being funny are the special effects sequences the makers of this film didn’t feel bold enough to tackle. I don’t know why not, since the principles involved had existed since Melies, and anyway, we hardly need to the fall down the rabbit hole or Alice’s growth spurts to be conventionally convincing.





This is the only version I can think of in which Father William actually appears as a character.
They do try to get a bunch of the rhymes in, but have to break them up to fit the intertitles, and they don’t break them sensibly.
The alarmingly thin Viola Savoy lived to be 87, so if she had an eating disorder, she presumably recovered. Nobody else makes much of an impression as they’re trapped inside sweltering Disneyland costumes, as in the 1933 Paramount job. As I say, for as an approach for a silent, it makes sense, though something that allowed performance nuances to come through would also be nice. Of the Banana Splits grotesques, the ones with necks are the ones that work best, even if the Dodo takes things a bit too far, with a head that wobbles alarmingly; the neckless mouse, dormouse, etc, are just kind of horrifying lumps. Lovecraftian Shoggoths. The caterpillar is like something out of Wakamatsu.




Otherwise, the most interesting feature is the prologue, far longer than Carroll’s, but without any plot, just showing Alice puttering about. The attempt is to make a Freudian ALICE, whereby the items and characters in the Wonderland dream are inspired by things she sees in her real quotidian life. It’s an interesting conceit, but while it doesn’t make Carroll’s imagery any less weird, it’s an attempt to do so. I don’t despise it as much as the Tim Burton film’s kack-handed attempt to turn the story into a typical battle-between-good-and-evil narrative, complete with Disney Princess. I think the thing to do when adapting Carroll is to be true to his odd affect, his good jokes, and treat the events as if they had a rigorous logic that must be respected, even if we aren’t allowed to understand what makes it work.