Actually about the meaning behind children's play patterns?

Right before seeing this Alice, I rented the '66 BBC version:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060089/?ref_=tt_rec_tti

For anyone who hasn't yet seen that B&W version, it's visually like if Ingmar Bergman had made "When Alice Broke the 7th Seal"; lots of Alice staring expressionlessly off into space, even while interacting with others. First time through, I dubbed it, "Alice in No-Budget-Land", since the animal characters were all just men in formal dress, with few elaborate costumes. But watching it again with commentary explained the director's theory that the characters in the dream would've been Alice Liddel's interpretation of the academic types she was around at Oxford, so that film just depicted them literally as such; a unique and worthwhile take in the end.

Now, I only rented that one by mistake because I was looking for this 1988 version, which I vaguely remembered from 'Videohound's Cult Flicks and Trash Pics'. While others have tried to see Freudian themes or how the meaning of the book translated here, I interpreted it in terms of what was actually supposed to be happening while Alice conjured up what we saw.

That is to say, it's the story of a horribly neglected child, trapped for days on end in a house full of creepy old *beep* her imagination finally dealing with her situation as best she could. Despite her appearing to wake up at the end, what makes this version unique is that she may not have literally been dreaming so much as playing with her surroundings to compensate for not being able to escape them.

I say escape, because this is THE most claustrophobic Alice movie I've ever seen. I think the White Rabbit breaking out of a case symbolized her desire to get out of the house on her own, but despite her best efforts to imagine chasing him outside, all she can visualize of the outdoors is a wasteland with that table in the middle, so she's still stuck in the house the rest of the adventure.

For that matter, she's probably in the same room for the first half, since every table having a knob that pops off a stuck drawer probably means it was actually the same table. Alice just tries to make it different by prying it open with a different tool and focusing on different contents each time. She finally gets so sick of this happening that she resorts to playing with the knob by pretending it's a mushroom, which results in the caterpillar giving her permission to destroy it so she didn't have to interact with it anymore.

Alice seeing how much of her environment she can destroy without incurring the intrusion of her absent guardians may be the key the whole movie. Someone in another thread mentioned that Alice became less timid after she busted out of the doll-shell in the pantry, and that might be the greatest metaphor for escaping confinement in the movie. I think the whole time she kept shrinking into a doll, she was actually pretending the doll was her, having it fight the animals trying to get her out of the block house, as the small doll had greater relative freedom of movement in that one room that a real girl. The pantry, however, had to be a different place, so I think ripping her way out of the doll as she did meant she got sick of playing with it and gutted it with the scissors before venturing out into the rest of the house. She probably cut up some playing cards too.

For that matter, we never see the rabbit just sitting in the display case before it animates, do we? I think Alice busted the case and took it out to play with long before the movie, but couldn't make the stiff bunny do anything but leak sawdust. The adults removed it, but not the broken glass case, implying they were more concerned about the mess than the girl's safety. So she never broke anything quite that big again for fear of the repercussions, but to her the rabbit's removal from the room meant it gained freedom, so she imagined what it might be doing out on its own while searching the house for where the parents hid it, paradoxically hoping to never find it, as that would leave nothing to actually do with it but cut its head off.

The mad tea party was really disturbing because it, appropriately, touched on the nature of mental illness. It seemed to be Alice's big break from the repetitiveness of playing with that same drawer in the same room, but once she's there, all Alice can think to do is her most repetitive play yet: the same actions and phrases come over and over until the wooden Hatter is full of watches and there are no viable actions left. Much like how dementia can cause someone to be stuck in routines that have lost meaning even to them. Even when she somewhat escapes physical confinement, she can't escape the monotony of what that's done to her brain. So before she reaches the freedom of adulthood, will Alice still feel so trapped that her only escape is to stab people with those scissors she's hiding, and it's not the White Rabbit whose head she wants to cut off?

Or maybe the only lesson is to be grateful for going through childhood after toys actually got good enough that we didn't always have to resort to playing with the grown-ups' disturbing garbage...but then that's only true for the most affluent parts of the developed world, isn't it? The meanings behind different toys and how the play-patterns they inspire affect child psychology could fill up a whole book, but a thoughtful dissection of this movie could fill up a good chapter.

"Oh, I am going to smack you SO HARD if this works, movie!" -Crow T. Robot