![]() ![]() ![]() “It had to convey the third dimension by size and appearance and vanish,” O’Connor told interviewer Ron Merk in 1993. ![]() Mary Blair inspirational paintingO’Connor was particularly concerned that Whitaker would be unable to handle the sequence without some firm direction. He made grids with vanishing points on his layouts so that the animators like Judge Whitaker could understand how to do it correctly. Blair’s ‘March of the Cards’ sketches display the dynamic staging and choreography, colors, and semi-abstract imagery seen in the final version on the screen.”ĭisney layout legend Ken O’Connor was the person who laid out that sequence and had to work out all the perspective problems like the cards becoming big in the foreground and receding into being smaller rectangles as they pulled back. John Canemaker, well respected animator and Disney historian, remarked that “the ‘March of the Cards’ derived from dozens of Mary Blair’s small paintings is as visually exciting as anything in the Disney canon. The scene referred to as “The March of the Cards” mimics the hallucinogenic aspect of the Pink Elephant sequence from the earlier animated feature, Dumbo (1941), with the various suits of cards becoming neon pink, blue, green and yellow as they go through their nightmarish musical maneuvers. They all operate with a type of “hive mentality” common in certain insects like bees and ants where they function as one efficient unit to take care of the Queen rather than exhibit individual personalities and goals. In Alice in Wonderland, all the cards have the same indistinguishable brownish tan colored back with a white border so that when they lay face down, they cannot be identified. In one of the most beloved Mickey Mouse shorts, Thru the Mirror (1936), Mickey after reading the Lewis Carroll book Through the Looking Glass, dreams that he has climbed up on to the mantel in his bedroom and gone through the huge mirror into a realm where anything is plausibly impossible…including the very memorable dance number with playing cards that may have helped provide inspiration for the eventual feature film. ![]() Walt attended, accompanied by a very young Kathryn Beaumont (who voiced Alice) in an Alice costume. Thirteen writers are credited with the story besides Carroll.Īlice in Wonderland had its world premiere at the Leicester Square Theatre in London on July 26, 1951. It fascinated me the first time I read it as a schoolboy and as soon as I possibly could after I started making animated cartoons, I acquired the film rights to it.”Įven though he acquired the rights in 1938, work finally began seriously on the feature in 1949 and over the next two years, fifty thousand man-hours, 700,000 drawings and three million dollars were devoted to producing the film. As Walt stated in American Weekly magazine (August 11, 1946), “No story in English literature has intrigued me more than Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Walt Disney had long been interested in the story of Alice, perhaps inspired by the book Animated Cartoons (1920) by E.G. In John Grant’s very fine book, Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters, where he occasionally spotlights the smaller characters, even he fails to mention the playing cards in Alice in Wonderland (1951) whose roles add much to that film. In discussing the Disney animated feature films, some of the smaller supporting characters that have added to the story or the gags are too often dismissed and forgotten. ![]()
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