Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a work of children's literature by the British mathematician and author Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy realm populated by talking creatures and anthropomorphic playing cards.

Works influenced

Alice and the rest of Wonderland continue to inspire or influence many other works of art to this day—sometimes indirectly; via the Disney movie, for example. The character of the plucky yet proper Alice has proven immensely popular and inspired similar heroines in literature and pop culture, many also named Alice in homage.

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Numerous works have borrowed the characters and incidents of the Alice books to illustrate "altered state" experiences brought about by psychedelic drugs. It would seem unlikely that Carroll, that straitlaced Victorian clergyman, could have approved.

Related Topics:
"altered state" experiences - Psychedelic drugs - Victorian

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Literature

• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce is famously influenced by Alice. The novel is about a dream, and includes such lines as: "Alicious, twinstreams twinestraines, through alluring glass or alas in jumboland?" and "...Wonderlawn's lost us for ever. Alis, alas, she broke the glass! Liddell lokker through the leafery, ours is mistery of pain."
• Tad Williams' science fiction "series", Otherland, is heavily influenced by Alice. There are sections involving a Red Queen, the chess-squares concept from Looking Glass, and the evil men following the protagonists take the form of Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum several times.
• Vladimir Nabokov translated Alice into his native Russian. His novels include many Carrollian allusions, such as the spoof book titles that run through Ada, or Ardor. However, Nabokov told his student and annotator Alfred Appel that the infamous Lolita, with its paedophilic protagonist, makes no conscious allusions to Carroll (despite the novel's photography theme and Carroll's interest in the art form).
• British writer Jeff Noon has inserted many Carrollian allusions into a series of cyberpunk novels, beginning with Vurt (1993), that are set in a fantasy-future Manchester. In the books, Noon applies a logical extension of the Wonderland and Looking-Glass World concepts into a virtual reality cyberverse that characters occasionally get lost in. One possible interpretation of the books is that everything happens in the dream of Alice, akin to the supposed "dream of the Red King" in Through the Looking-Glass. Noon also wrote Automated Alice, which he punningly calls a trequel to the Alice books. In this illustrated novella, Alice enters a grandfather clock and emerges in future Manchester, which has many bizarre denizens including an invisible cat named Quark and Celia, the Automated Alice.
• Alice Liddell is a character in the Riverworld series of science fiction books by Philip José Farmer.
• Sign of Chaos, written by Roger Zelazny as part of The Chronicles of Amber features two chapters taking place in a manufactured Shadow designed to resemble Wonderland as part of a drug-induced hallucination.
• Gilbert Adair paid tribute to Carroll in a further Alice adventure: Alice Through the Needle's Eye (1985)
• 'The Looking-glass Wars' written by Frank Beddor depicts an alternative to the Carroll's Alice, implying that Carrol in fact stole the story off Alyss (AKA Alice Liddel) who had been sent to the real world from Wonderland when the Red queen overthrew Wonderland. It follows her exploits with the familiar characters, however suggesting that they are cooler than the distorted childish versions Carrol depicted from "Princess Alyss's" Stories.

Art

• Dorothea Tanning's 1943 painting Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (1946) is evocative of Alice in Wonderland, though with mysterious threatening overtones.

Comics and animation

• Alice makes an appearance (in passing) in Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen; more significantly, she is a main character in Moore's Lost Girls, which imagines her having erotic adventures.
• Neil Gaiman has used Carollian imagery in his Sandman series. In one issue, a minor character called Zelda is depicted as Alice in a dream.
• Alice appears in a number of graphic novels, such as Haunted Knight (where Alice meets Batman).
• Nippon Animation produced anime of Alice in Wonderland in 1983 to 1984. This anime adopted an original story that Alice and her rabbit Benny take a trip to Wonderland and go home for each episode.
• Miyuki-chan in Wonderland, an anime and manga by CLAMP, is a sexy animated parody of Alice. In Card Captor Sakura, another anime by CLAMP, the title character dresses up like Alice for an episode in which she shrinks drastically. In the third season, Sakura is sucked into a copy of "Alice in Wonderland" in which characters from the anime appear as characters in the story.
• The anime series Serial Experiments Lain tells the story of a girl who is drawn into the cyberspace "underground" of the Wired, and features a character named Arisu ("Alice") Mizuki.
• Additionally, the anime series InuYasha also follows the adventures of a young girl who is drawn into a fantasy world when she falls down an old well. Viz, the company who translated the series into English, translated the title of the third episode as, "Down the Rabbit Hole and Back Again".
• The manga Alice 19th by Y? Watase involves Alice's older sister being drawn into a darker Wonderland.

Film, television and radio

• Cinnamon bear, a 1938 children's radio drama.
• ', a 1974 porno, is based directly upon Lewis Carroll's story, with some slight twists. An interesting movie beyond the porno, with catchy songs.
• Labyrinth, a 1986 film directed by Jim Henson, counts the Alice books among its influences. It has a distinct Carrollian flavour. After all, it is the story of a young girl who must brave a strange fantasy realm populated by unusual talking creatures, in which she must solve a number of puzzles.
• The Matrix (1999) features a protagonist, Neo, who tags along with a gang after he sees one of them sporting a white rabbit tattoo. The Wachowski brothers who directed the film have stated that Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a running theme in their Matrix trilogy.
• Donnie Darko (2001) recasts some Carrollian elements in a darker storyline: a state of dream or nightmare, a demonic rabbit man, a (golf) hole in the ground.
• Resident Evil (2002) has several references to the stories—notably, the main character who is unnamed until the credits reveal that she is called Alice. Also, the T-Virus is tested on a "white rabbit", the commandos open a mirror to reach the underground train-station ("Through the looking glass") and the villain is a holographic entity controlled by a computer called the Red Queen, who at one point in the film, attempts to get the main character to behead one of the other characters infected with the T-virus. ("Off with her head!")
• Jurassic Park (1993) The programmer creates a program called "white rabbit" which bypasses the parks security so he can make his escape.

Popular music

• The Beatles counted the Alice books among their many artistic influences, and this is referred to in various oblique ways. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band features a sleeve montage designed by Peter Blake that includes an image of Lewis Carroll. The third song on the record, "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds," begins with a line that Carroll could have written: "Picture yourself in a boat on a river..." Other Beatles songs with Carrollian imagery include "Cry Baby Cry," "Come Together," "Glass Onion," and "I Am The Walrus"—supposedly this Walrus is the one from Through the Looking-Glass.
• Neil Sedaka took Alice into the US Top 50 in 1963 with the single "Alice In Wonderland."
• Words and images from the Alice books acquire blatant psychedelic connotations in "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane from their 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow. The song's lyrics refer to pills that make you larger or smaller, for example (view the lyrics here). Journalist Hunter S. Thompson incorporated "White Rabbit" in his classic Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in an account of an LSD trip. "White Rabbit" has been covered by several other bands as well.
• There was a rash of Alice-related material in the music industry in the 1980s, a fad mainly fuelled by goth and indie rock musicians. Siouxsie & the Banshees, for instance, named their label Wonderland and cut an album called Through The Looking Glass. The former London-based Batcave Club was renamed "Alice In Wonderland." The Sisters of Mercy had a hit single, "Alice," about the image of Carroll's heroine.
• Stevie Nicks has a song titled "Alice" on her 1989 album The Other Side of the Mirror. Its lyrics mention Alice and the Mad Hatter (view the lyrics here).
• Virginia Astley has released a lot of Alice-related work, including her LP From Gardens Where We Feel Secure with sound effects recorded a few miles south of where Alice's adventures began; and songs like "Tree Top Club," "Nothing Is What It Seems," and "Over the Edge of the World".
• Tom Waits released an 2002 album entitled Alice, consisting of songs that were written for a stage adaptation of Alice.
• The video for the Tom Petty song "Don't Come Around Here No More" portrays Alice, the Mad Hatter, and other Wonderland elements.
• The music video of the Gwen Stefani song "What You Waiting For?" is clearly Alice-inspired and shows the Queen of Hearts' garden maze and a mad tea party.

Computer and video games

• American McGee's Alice is a dark and bloody computer game tightly and closely based on the books, even as far to go in to some other Carrol work's.. Alice must return to a deadlier version of Wonderland and kill the Queen of Hearts. Alice, a cinematic adaptation of the game sometimes erroneously referred to as Dark Wonderland, is currently in development.
• ' has an early level that involves breaking into a huge mansion. As one goes deeper inside, it becomes "curiouser and curiouser"—resembling Alice more and more. The game Thief: Gold expanded this idea with an additional section to the mansion, known as "Little Big World" to fans, that involves first passing through a very small village and emerging in a gigantic kitchen. Thief was developed by Looking Glass Studios.
• The RPG Kingdom Hearts includes Alice as a somewhat important plot character (In other words, one of the Seven Princesses of Heart seeked by Maleficent and her group of Disney villains to open the Final Keyhole in Hollow Bastion that would lead to the literal Kingdom Hearts.) and Disney's version of Wonderland as one of the first worlds.
• The Silent Hill series contain a few references of Wonderland, in a contrasting homage to its surreal world. The best example of this is in the first game, where a door puzzle at the Alchemilla Hospital involves coloured blocks imprinted with the Cheshire Cat, Mad Hatter, Mock Turtle and The Queen of Hearts.
• Windham Classics "Alice In Wonderland" adventure game for the Commodore 64.