In the original books, Alice is a beautiful, smart, young seven-year old English girl living in the Victorian era. One summer day, Alice and her older sister went to relax on the riverbank near the house. Bored by her sister's book, Alice soon noticed a White Rabbit who seemed to be late and curiously followed him, as she was curious to know what he was late for. When the Rabbit went down his rabbit-hole, Alice followed and fell a long way past a variety of commonplace objects in what appeared to be a well. Upon reaching the bottom, Alice suffered a series of misadventures while attempting to get through the door into the Queen of Hearts's garden. After shrinking and growing several times, Alice finally got into the garden and ended up in a court of law. There, she began to grow to enormous size, evoking threats from the King and Queen. Ultimately, Alice lost her temper and screamed that they were all just a pack of cards, prompting her to wake up and realize it was all a dream.
Later, Alice found herself stuck in a room with no one for company but her cat, Dinah. Looking in a mirror, she began wondering what life was like on the other side. When she tried to enter the mirror, she found she could and soon she was off on another series of adventures in a quest to reach the end of the chessboard and become a queen.
Character Outline
The original illustrations of Alice were entirely in black and white, so the color of her dress (therefore her "signature color") was not established. her first color illustrations, in The Nursery Alice were personally adjusted and colored by John Tenniel and show her dress as yellow, with blue trim.
It was Disney's version of Alice who helped make the popular image of the character as a young, cute and very beautiful 11 year old girl with blue eyes, thick blonde shoulder-length hair, red lips and fair skin, wearing a blue knee-length dress with a white pinafore, corset, petticoat, knee-length pantalettes and stockings, a black hair-ribbon and black round toe shoes in "Mary Jane" style. This look has perhaps become the classic and most widely recognized Alice in Wonderland dress in later works.
Tenniel drew Alice in two variants: for Through the Looking-Glass, her pinafore is more ruffled and she is shown in striped stockings, an image which has remained in much of the later art. Also in Through the Looking-Glass, her hair is held back with a wide ribbon, normally depicted as black. In honor of Alice, such hair bands are sometimes called "Alice Bands," particularly in the UK.
Personality
A drawing of Alice by Lewis Carroll
Alice is portrayed as being very curious. She's often seen daydreaming and gives herself advice instead of listening to the advice of others. The closest thing Alice has as a friend is Dinah, her cat, and even Dinah can't understand Alice's dreams of finding "a world of her own." Alice is well mannered, polite, courteous, mature and has an elegance and gentleness of a young woman, although once she falls into Wonderland she finds it harder and harder to maintain her composure. She is shown to be determined, but her determination is often overpowered by her temper, seeing as she doesn't give up on finding the White Rabbit until she gets frustrated, and is easily put off by rudeness.
Alice in Other Media
Film adaptations
[[Alice in Wonderland (1951)|1951 Disney Film
Disney's Alice.
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Alice is the main protagonist of Disney's animated film Alice In Wonderland, voiced by Kathryn Beaumont. Alice was drawn looking a bit older than her story book counterpart, about 12 years old, but still keeping the wonder and childlike quality of a young girl. She is very curious.
She is portrayed as being well mannered, cute, very beautiful, polite, courteous, mature and has an elegance and gentleness of a young woman, although once she falls into Wonderland she finds it harder and harder to maintain her composure. She is shown to be determined, but her determination is often overpowered by her temper, seeing as she does not give up on finding the White Rabbit until she gets frustrated, and is easily put off by rudeness.
1985 Television Miniseries
Alice is portrayed in a 1985 Television miniseries by Natalie Gregory. This series actually featured many characters overlooked by the Disney film, including the dreaded Jabberwock
In the dark, surrealist Czech film Alice, the character is played by Kristýna Kohoutová; the English dubbed version features the voice of Camilla Power. Alice herself narrates the dialogue of all the other characters in the film.
She follows a stuffed White Rabbit into "Wonderland," which is a strange mix of a household-like areas with very little concern for logical space or size and it inhabitants tend to be strange mixtures of rubbish and dead animals, such as a bed with bird legs, or a stuffed lizard with glass eyes. After returning home, she ponders if she would cut off the head of the stuffed rabbit or not with its own scissors.
In the 1999 adaptation, which won 4 Emmys, Alice is played by Tina Majorino. The movie combines portions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, & features such talents as Whoopi Goldberg (the Cheshire Cat) & Martin Short (the Mad Hatter). These characters are first seen at the beginning of the movie as guests at a party Alice is attending before being re-invented as characters in Wonderland. Other elements of the film also suggest that Alice is dreaming/creating the world with her subconscious.
In the 2010 adaptation, Alice Kingsleigh was played by Mia Wasikowska. She is a 19-year-old who doesn't really fit in with her upper-class Victorian lifestyle and is strong-willed, ready to make her own choices in life. She is brought back to Wonderland (by McTwisp) to slay the Jabberwocky. Throughout the film, Alice believes that she is just another one of her dreams- or "nightmares," as she called them as a child- that she has had since childhood, but towards the end she realizes that other dreams were really memories and everything is real. After that, her return becomes a rite of passage as she discovers herself.
In 2009, Syfy aired a two-part Mini Series titled Alice that was set to be a re-imagining of the original story. Alice is a brunette in her early twenties. Because of her father's apparent abandonment of her and her mother, Alice has difficulties trusting men, preventing her from being part of a successful relationship. When her boyfriend Jack Chase (Heart) is kidnapped, she follows him into a re-imagined Wonderland. She is portrayed by Caterina Scorsone.
Novels
In Frank Beddor's novel, The Looking Glass Wars, an adaptation of the Alice books, Alice is re-imagined as Alyss Heart, the rightful heir to the throne of Wonderland and a warrior princess with magical powers of her own. The preface of the story is that Alyss fled to Earth where she met Lewis Carroll and told him her story. He turned it into a nonsensical fairytale in which he even misspelled her name.
Jeff Noon wrote a third Alice book, Automated Alice, in which Alice, still of a similar age, goes "through the clock's workings" with the guidance of the bird Whipporwill. Noon's depiction of Alice is quite similar to Carroll's and is an imaginative blend of the absurdities of the earlier Alice novels with modern conceptions of logic, mechanisation and cyberspace. Carroll's own interests in logic and metaphysics are clearly the inspiration for Noon's approach.
In the 2000 PC game American McGee's Alice, Alice is portrayed as a tortured young woman with short, brunette hair and emerald green eyes, voiced by Susie Brann.
Her dress in saga is a navy blue dress with a white apron, which pockets have astronomical signs. She wears black and white striped socks and knee high black boots with silver buckles. Even though it varies from her promotional image to in-game.
Set after the two books, the game's plot tells that Alice was orphaned at 8 years of age when her parents and older sister were burned alive in an accidental fire caused by Dinah (In Madness Returns is supposed to be different). Afterward, she falls into a catatonic state, and is condemned to Rutledge's Asylum for treatment. She remains there for 10 years, faced with her own survivor's guilt and the mistreatment of patients in the mental hospitals of the time. After many years, the White Rabbit arrives in her cell and tells her she must return to Wonderland and save the creatures there from the tyrannical Queen of Hearts. By doing so, she not only saves Wonderland, but her own sanity.
In Alice: Madness Returns, the second game following American McGee's Alice, Alice Liddell, comes back.
Set after a year from being released from Rutledge (after defeating the Queen Of Hearts), Alice is left still an orphan, now working for her Psychaiatrist, Dr. Angus Bumby. After seeing visions and hallucinations of Wonderland being destroyed once again, Alice must set on an adventure to destroy this new villain and find the truth about her family's fire to free her Wonderland's peace again.
Disney's 1951 version of Alice is seen as one of the most important characters of the video game series Kingdom Hearts. She is one of the Princesses of Heart — seven maidens of pure light needed to open the final Door to Darkness, leading to Kingdom Hearts, the heart of all worlds — and the first Princess of Heart the protagonist, Sora, meets in the first game. Alice also appears in the sequel, Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and its remake, Kingdom Hearts Re:Chain of Memories, as a figment of the protagonist's memory.
She is also mentioned in Kingdom Hearts II even though she doesn't make an appearance. In this episode, when Sora and his friends need the password to Ansem the Wise's database, the DTD, they realize that DTD stands for Door to Darkness. As all seven Princess of Heart are required to open the Door to Darkness, they soon learn that the password are their names. Alice's name is mentioned as part of the list.
In the otome game "Heart no Kuni no Alice, She appears as Alice Liddell who was kidnapped by Peter White into Wonderland and meets bizarre characters that fall in love with her. She also appears in the sequels "Clover no Kuni no Alice" and "Joker no Kuni no Alice."
Appearances in Other Media
Alice also appears in the anime adaption by Nippon Animation as a girl with red hair, a hat, and a red and white dress. She appears with Benny Bunny and have many adventures in Wonderland.
"Woody Allen's film Alice, while not a direct adaptation, did follow a woman who has a series of surreal adventures. Alice also appears as a college-attending teenager alongside Wendy Darling, Dorothy Gale, and Susan Pevensie in Chicago of 2005 and 2006, in the comic book series The Oz/Wonderland Chronicles. Alice also appears as an aging woman in Alan Moore's graphic novel Lost Girls.
In the Tokyo Disneyland DreamLights version of the Main Street Electrical Parade, Alice is voiced by Kat Cressida. Kristýna Kohoutová portrayed her in Svankmajer's Alice (her English dub was done by Camilla Power). In the Japanese version of Kingdom Hearts, she was voiced by Mika Doi.
Also, in the anime Pandora Hearts, there are two characters loosely based of Alice. Alice the B-rabbit, and The Will of the Abyss. Both characters share there first name with Alice, and seeing as many aspects of Pandora Hearts are based off of Alice in Wonderland, it can be assumed there names are as well.
Alice appears in the novel "Wonderland Revisited and the Games Alice Played There," where she disembarks to meet a number of the inhabitants of Wonderland including the Red Queen, the Jack of Diamonds, the Mah-jong Dragons, the Red King, and the Red King's Gamekeeper.
She appears in the british film "Malice in Wonderland" as an American student who suffers amnesia after getting hit by a black cab and finding herself in Wonderland.
In the DS game "A Witch's Tale," a mystical savior named Alice appeared and used the Witch's magic against them and sealed them away. Also the main character is named Liddell, who is a witch-in-training.
Alice is mentioned in a book when a creul mother says "Come now, Jessie. You're just as crazy as that Alice girl from Crumberlind." The daughter responds by saying "She was from Wonderland, mum."
She appears in the arcade game Märchen Maze, as a girl with brown pigtail hair and a red dress. She travels along with Time Usagi, the white rabbit to defeat the Queen of Darkness.
In episode 13 of the anime: 'Ouran High School Host Club' the main character, Haruhi, takes the role of Alice after falling down a hole trying follow Usa-chan. There, in her own Wonderland, her friends also make an appearance similar to Wonderland characters (Ex: Tamaki as the Mad Hatter; Mori as the Doormouse) and also meets her mother (who has died). She later wakes up to find it was all just a dream. In the original manga, both Tamaki, the twins and Haruhi (although the previous two are re-scripted as the mad hatter and the cheshire cat respectively) take the roll of Alice to begin with, Honey taking the form of the white rabbit and Mori appearing as the baby.
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