Visually a classic, but weaker story-wise than other Disney masterpieces

All good points, and this is definitely my favorite of the post-war animated features....but the source material itself is episodic.

The Alice books don't follow the standard structure of children's literature (or Disney features) where there is a clearly-defined antagonist from the beginning (a villain traditionally) and the main character has to outwit them and overcome dire obstacles to achieve his/her goal.

In the first book, "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland," after winding up in the long hallway with doors and the first set of growing/shrinking exercises, Alice's only goal is to make it to the "beautiful garden" which we later find out to be that of the King and Queen of Hearts.

That's it. There's no life or death situation, and Alice's eternal happiness is never at stake.

In an attempt to mitigate this problematic aspect of the original story, Disney and his team attempted to impose a primary villain in the Queen of Hearts (which is really not the case in the book, becasue characters even joke about nobody every actually being executed) and a minor villain in the Cheshire Cat (who is not a trouble maker for Alice at all in the book, and much less prominently featured).

The "most effective" scene you cite doesn't appear in the book (or in "Through The Looking Glass") at all, since Alice (unlike, say, Dorothy from "The Wizard of Oz,") never states that her primary goal is to "go home." That was invented by the Disney story department to finally try and inject drama in a story that has little. In my opinion, at best this "goal" of Alice's comes too late in the film to matter much, and frankly doesn't belong in it at all.

The charm and genius of Lewis Carroll's (born Charles L. Dodgson) books, and why they've survived so strongly for nearly 150 years, and are adapted for film/television in a major way at least once a decade, ARE the episodic nature of the stories, the colorful, unique characters Alice meets, the language and fanciful ideas presented. Dodgson/Carroll thought children got ENOUGH moralizing and lessons from families, schools, the church, and society at large. These books were meant to throw out all that conventional moralization and for kids to HAVE UNFETTERED FUN for a change. There's even an exchange with the Duchess (not covered in the Disney version) in which morals and moralizing are lampooned.

The Alice books are considered classics of English literature....not just "children's literature." This is not the case with the most of Disney's features. Nobody quotes "Pinocchio," or "Cinderella," or "Sleeping Beauty." Nobody minded when liberties were taken with the source material in these cases, and even though MAJOR departures were made from Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" about a decade later, not many objected because its episodic nature and imposed goals and obstacles for the protagonists were not in sharp deviation to the expectations of those who knew the book....again, not a major literary classic.

I think Walt and his story team struggled under these restrictions and found a solution they may not have loved, but could live with. It's also important to note that this was a period of immense growth for the Disney Studio (live action films, television, and Disneyland were already being planned) and the boss's attention may have been elsewhere much of the time. The directing animators have all noted that there was an uncohesiveness in the way the material was approached, and that they were all kind of trying to top each other rather than work together, by producing a "crazier/weirder/whackier" sequence than the other guy.

Still, as I said, "Alice" is one of my personal all time favorites.

^ "Oddly enough, Burton's version attempted to fit the story into a traditional narrative of good vs. evil, complete with a prophecy and a monster that needed to be killed, and everyone hated it."
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Well, to be fair, it earned $334 million in North America and well over $1 billion world-wide, so it's a bit of stretch to say that EVERYONE hated it.

It also sold over 4 million DVDs and Blu-rays, and many of those were probably people who saw it in theaters and wanted to own it. "Everyone" is a gross overstatement.

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The trouble is, the same factor that is the film's strength of theme is its weakness in story: to create this tedium-of-nonsense perception, the film actually has to have the audience feel the same frustration at what they're experiencing as Alice does. Thus, we end up just as impatient with the film as Alice is with Wonderland itself.

Funny thing is I feel many Disney films of the 50s and 60s had somewhat of an episodic and random feel to them. Alice ends up being the best of the bunch highly due to that fact that it's the one film in which that structure works perfectly.

Don't make me take off my shoe!

I love the colors in 'Alice.' I don't mind the lack of a coherent story. It's Alice's dream. A dream flits about with no real order. I think that this version of Alice is a surreal masterpiece.

It is a great film but one of its other weaknesses it had are the fake English accents.
Simply awful and take you out of the wonderland.
Shame they couldn't afford real English actors instead of having Americans fake it but at least they did better than the incredible nauseating Simpsons "English" accent most Americans do these days which is really an American accent because only Americans speak like that.