August in Wonderland: Alice au pays des merveilles

 Alice au pays des merveilles (1970) is a French TV movie that adapts Alice in Wonderland.  As an adaptation it's kind of surprising, combining fidelity to the original novel with a literally dizzying array of special effects, somehow taking one of the stranger children's books in English literature and making it even weirder.

 

The story begins on the island of Le Grand Jatte.  Not the actual island, though; instead Alice (Marie-Veronique Maurin) and her sister Lorina (Aimee Fontaine) are spending a hot summer afternoon inside the painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Le Grand Jatte" by Georges Seraut.  However, while Lorina is reading a book, Alice is bored, at least until she spots a white rabbit with a waistcoat and pocket watch (Guy Grosso) run past.  She follows, only to fall down a rabbit hole and discover a strange new world underground.

From there the plot sticks very closely to Carroll's original story.  In other words, there's barely a plot at all.  Alice sees a beautiful garden and decides that she wants to visit it, but she spends much of the film just wandering around and meeting eccentric creatures who are varying degrees of rude and argumentative. 

There are changes, of course; the movie cuts out the sequence in which Alice meets a puppy (the puppy always gets cut), the White Rabbit lives in a house which is much bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, and the song the Duchess (Annette Poivre) sings to her baby has an extra gruesome chorus, but for the most part the movie plays the hits.  Alice has tea with the Mad Hatter (Hubert Deschamps), plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts (Alice Sapritch), and so on.  

However, there are two reasons to watch this adaptation rather than just reading the book.  First, the special effects are, to use the technical term, bonkers.  The movie makes extensive use of blue screen, combining live action with animation that looks like it's been lifted directly from Sesame Street, combined with swirling colors and screensaver technology decades ahead of its time.  Sometimes the effects are just filler, but there's always something happening onscreen.

The second reason is Alice herself.  Because there's barely a plot and Alice spends most of her time in Wonderland wandering from place to place, Alice often comes across as kind of passive in movies.  Not here, though; this Alice is spirited.  Spunky.  Shouty and kind of bossy.  This is an Alice who gives at least as well as she gets, and she also tramples all over the fourth wall like Deadpool crossed with Godzilla.  Combine that with the aforementioned bonkers special effects bringing Alice's musings to life onscreen, and for once Alice is the most interesting person in her movie.