Film
A transposition and reinterpretation of both Lewis Carroll novels starring the little Alice (Alice in Wonderland and Alice Beyond the Looking Glass). It attracted a lot of criticism and controversy due to the numerous distortions made to the British author's original novel. The narrative structure is very similar to the episodic one of the previous decade, but this gave artists the opportunity to indulge their imagination by pushing the pedal of humour and nonsense. Never before had there been so many ingenious ideas and memorable characters that we see parading through scene after scene, from the dazed Pinco Panco and Panco Pinco to the Cheshire Cat, via Captain Libeccio, the Caterpillar and the Mad Hatter. The omnipresent vein of madness also gives the film a dreamlike, and at times even sinister, flavour without ever overdoing it.
A film far too avant-garde for the period in which it was released. And just speaking of avant-garde: this taste for verbal nonsense finds an accomplice in the surreal atmosphere that arose from the intense if brief relationship between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. In 1945 they began working together on a project that only years later (in 2003) would lead to the short film Destino.
Art
A transposition and reinterpretation of both Lewis Carroll's novels, of which a lavishly illustrated edition by Arthur Rackham came out in 1907. With his characteristic nouveau stroke he played a very important role in the artistic contamination of this film: from his drawings the animator Ward Kimball was able to derive the image of some iconic characters such as the Mad Hatter or the Caterpillar. Unforgettable is the scene in which the latter asks young Alice the right questions ( who are you? ), shrunk down to six inches in height as she wriggles among huge mushrooms. We too can have a similar experience in the Upside-Down Mushroom Room at Fondazione Prada, where the german artist Carsten Höller has reconstructed a room with outsized mushrooms hanging from the ceiling. The situation is reversed, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.
Not only the mushrooms, even the flowers for little Alice are huge. Like Georgia O'Keefe's.
"When you pick a flower and you really look at it and in that moment it's your whole world."
Explains the artist who has devoted much of her output to painting large flowers. It was as if one flower could fill the whole sky. Using simple shapes and blocks of colour, Georgia O'Keeffe created a veritable new artistic language. The absolute symbol of her art is represented by a lily-ball, her ideal of beauty, made up of harmony, proportion, simplicity and elegance. These are the same ideals that the flowers of Wonderland extol, but unlike art, they are ready to discriminate against those who are different from them and do not meet their standards. Ready to discriminate against weeds.
Then, taking Hieronymus Bosch's demon with a bagpipe in the Judgment Triptych (1504), preserved at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, as a point of reference, Kimball created a cute family of ornithotrombe instead: fantastic creatures that are half ducks and half trumpets. What he did was simply to isolate the last part from the English word 'trumpet' to make cute trumpets as pets. The taste for verbal nonsense, which goes hand in hand with the iconic character of characters such as the Cheshire Cat, finds an accomplice in the surreal atmosphere influenced by the intense if brief relationship between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali. In 1945, they began working on a project that only years later (in 2003) would lead to the birth of the short film Destiny, in which the works of the eccentric Spanish artist and the symbols of Surrealism, of which he was the main exponent together with Luis Buñuel, are revived. It is no coincidence that Dali's works are often juxtaposed with those of the Bosch, who have always fascinated the observer, pushing him towards ever deeper interpretations, in some cases even bizarre ones. Among his most important works is the Last Judgement. The triptych is among the few works created in the artist's time that manages to evoke with such precision the fear felt by medieval people for the end of the world. The work is divided into three large panels, in which the apex scenes of Christianity are depicted. What the artist depicts is the first and last act of the great history of mankind, through a passage that begins with the creation of the first human beings Eve and Adam and ends, according to the sacred scriptures, with the Last Judgement, in which the souls of men are divided between heaven and hell.
External Links
Watch Alice in Wonderland on Disney +
Artworks:
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