“Curiouser and curiouser!”
| Alice | |
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| Gender | Female |
| Age | 7 (original books) 11 (1951) 19 (2010) |
| Hair Color | Blonde (most depictions) Brown (eg. 1972, 1999) |
| Eye Color | Blue |
| Address | London, England |
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| Family | Charles Kingsleigh (father) Helen Kingsleigh (mother) Margaret Manchester (sister) Lowell Manchester (brother-in-law) Unnamed brother |
| Friends | The Cheshire Cat The White Rabbit The Mad Hatter The White Knight |
| Enemies | The Queen of Hearts The Red Queen |
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| First appearance | Alice's Adventures in Wonderland |
| Last appearance | Alice in Wonderland (2010) |
| Portrayer | Charlotte Henry (1933) Kathryn Beaumont (1951) Fiona Fullerton (1972) Tina Majorino Mia Wasikowska Caterina Scorsone |
Alice Kingsleigh (b. 1846) is the main character from the books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll.
Biography
First Visit to Wonderland
Alice Kingsleigh was born in 1846 to Charles and Helen Kingsleigh. She had an older sister named Margaret and an unnamed brother. Alice also owned a pet cat named Dinah. Alice was very imaginative and had a habit of saying "Let's pretend..." before inventing fanciful situations whilst talking to herself.
On May 4, 1853, seven-year-old Alice and Margaret went to relax on the riverbank near the house. Bored by Margaret's book, Alice soon noticed a White Rabbit who seemed to be late and curiously followed him. Following the Rabbit down his rabbit-hole, Alice 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, But just as the Queen of Hearts was about to behead her she returned home. She thought her adventure was just a dream but a surprise lay for her the next time she would visit Underland.
Character Outline
In the original books, Alice is a seven-year old English girl living in the Victorian era. As Alice was first drawn in black and white, her colors varied from artist to artist; in theThe Nursery "Alice", the first coloured-version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, her dress is yellow.
It was Disney's version of Alice who helped make the popular image of the character as a fairly beautiful young girl with blue eyes, thick blonde hair and fair skin, wearing a blue knee-length dress with a white pinafore, stockings, petticoat, white tights, a black hair-ribbon and round toe shoes in "Mary Jane" style. However, before Disney, Alice has been colored by Tenniel in a blue dress, with white stripes at the bottom, and her pinafore outlined in red. 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
Disney's iconic version of Alice
1951 Disney Film
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 11 or 12, but still keeping the wonder and child-like quality of a young girl.
She is portrayed as being 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 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
1988 Czech Film
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.
Mia Wasikowska as Alice.
Disney's 2010 Adaptation
In the 2010 adaptation, Alice Kingsleigh is played by Mia Wasikowska. She is now 19 years 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.
Mini Series
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 appearant 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.
Video Games
American McGee's Alice
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, vocied by Susie Brann.
Set after the two books, the game's plot tells that Alice was orphaned at a young age when her parents were burned alive in an accidental fire caused by Dinah. Afterward, she falls into a catatonic state, and is condemned to Rutledge's Asylum for treatment. She remains there for many 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.
Kingdom Hearts
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.
Alice in the Country of the Heart~Wonderful Wonder World~
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 you. 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.