“Curiouser
and curiouser!”
~ Alice 
Alice 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. She is also prominent in most expansions of the
"Wonderland" mythos.
Biography
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, next to a big tree on the riverbank
near the house. Bored by her sister's book, Alice soon noticed a White Rabbit who seemed to be late
for something and curiously followed him, as she wanted 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 finds 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, blue (her "signature
color") was not established. her first color illustrations, in The
Nursery Alice were personally adjusted and coloured 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 12 year old
girl with blue eyes, thick blonde shoulder-length hair, red lips and fair skin,
wearing a light blue short-sleeved, knee-length dress with a white pinafore,
corset, petticoat, frilly knee-length pantalettes and stockings, a black
hair-ribbon and black round toe shoes in a "Mary Jane" style. This
look has perhaps become the classic and most widely recognized Alice in
Wonderland dress in later works and costumes.
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
Alice is portrayed as being very curious, which
normally leads her into many stressful situations. 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 is the 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.
Video Games
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.
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 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 cruel 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.
Source: http://aliceinwonderland.wikia.com/wiki/Alice
No comments:
Post a Comment