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Dozing off in her garden, Alice (May Clark) is awakened by a white
rabbit (Mrs.Hepworth) the curious girl decides to follow no matter what -
and ultimately she even has to take a pill to shrink her down in size to
pass through a door to a weird wonderland. When in the rabbit's house
though, she grows back to her original size and hardly manages to get out
anymore. Later she attends the tea party of the Mad Hatter (Norman
Whitten) before meeting the Queen (Mrs Hepworth again) and accidently
insulting her. Alice is to be executed but pokes her executioner and makes
a hasty escape ... only to eventually wake up in her garden - was it all
just a dream? Apart from its historical importance of being the
first adaptation of Lewis Carroll's novel, Alice in Wonderland has
remarkably little to offer - and I'm not judging a more than 100 year old
film by today's standards here, but in its 8 minutes this little movie
doesn't even capture the gist of Carroll's book, and the technical
limitations of early cinema just don't serve the abundant imagination of
its source to well. Add to that a very stagey directorial effort and a
failure to bring its (rather isolated) sequences to life in a narrative
sense, and there's in fact not much left to make this movie recommendable
- but then again, one mustn't forget the film was made in 1903 and cinema
as a medium as such was still in its infancy.
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