Alice in Wonderland is a 1951 American animated musical fantasy comedy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures.

With the voices of Ed Wynn, Richard Haydn, Sterling Holloway, Jerry Colonna and Kathryn Beaumont in her film debut, the film follows a young girl, Alice, who falls down a rabbit hole and enters a nonsensical world, Wonderland, which is ruled by the Queen of Hearts, while encountering strange creatures, including the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat.

In a park in England, a young girl named Alice with her cat, Dinah, listens distractedly to her sister's history lesson, and begins daydreaming of a nonsensical world.

Upon landing in a place called Wonderland, she finds herself facing a tiny door, whose handle advises drinking from a bottle on a nearby table.

When the Dodo decides to burn the house down, Alice escapes by eating a carrot from the Rabbit's garden, which causes her to shrink to three inches tall.

Continuing to follow the Rabbit, Alice meets a garden of talking flowers who initially welcome her with a song, but then banish her, believing that humans are a type of weed.

In the woods, Alice gets stuck between multiple paths and encounters the mischievous Cheshire Cat, who suggests questioning the Mad Hatter or the March Hare to learn the Rabbit's location, but is unhelpful in giving directions.

[24] After the enormous success of his first full-length animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937),[25] Disney acquired the film rights to the Alice books with John Tenniel's illustrations from the Macmillan Company by May 1938[26][a] and officially registered the title with the Motion Picture Association of America.

[29] On March 1, 1939, British illustrator David Hall joined the Disney studio and was immediately assigned to create the concept artwork for the film.

[35] After finishing his work on Fantasia, concept artist Gordon Legg created new inspirational sketches for the film, but eventually left the studio the following year.

[33] In October of that year, given the box-office underperformance of Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940), as well as the World War II cutting off the foreign cinema market,[41] Joseph Rosenberg of Bank of America issued an ultimatum, ordering Disney to restrict himself to producing animated shorts and to finish features already in production; no other feature film would begin work until they had been released and earned back their costs.

[46] Disney considered child actress Margaret O'Brien for the title role,[49] but felt that Huxley's version was too literal an adaptation of Carroll's book.

Another scene that was deleted from a later draft occurred in Tulgey Wood, where Alice encountered what appeared to be a sinister-looking Jabberwocky hiding in the dark, before revealing himself as a comical-looking dragon-like beast with bells and factory whistles on his head.

In an effort to retain some of Carroll's imaginative poems, Disney commissioned top songwriters to compose songs built around them for use in the film.

[63] In 1957, Tutti Camarata arranged and conducted an elaborate original production of the Alice score with Darlene Gillespie, who had shown great promise among the Mickey Mouse Club cast as a singer.

Alice in Wonderland aired as the second episode of the Walt Disney's Disneyland television series on ABC on November 3, 1954,[68] in a severely edited version cut down to less than an hour.

The company even promoted it as a film in tune with the "psychedelic times", using radio commercials featuring allusions to the song "White Rabbit" performed by Jefferson Airplane.

Roy agreed, and later that summer they spoke to the Coca-Cola Company about sponsoring an hour-long Christmas broadcast featuring Disney hosting several cartoons and a scene from the upcoming film.

[68] Alice in Wonderland was one of the first titles available for the rental market on VHS and Beta and for retail sale on RCA's short-lived CED Videodisc format.

In January 2000, Walt Disney Home Video launched the Gold Classic Collection, and then Alice in Wonderland was re-issued on VHS and DVD in the line on July 4, 2000.

[75] A fully restored two-disc "Masterpiece Edition" was released on January 27, 2004, including the full hour-long episode of the Disney television show with Kathryn Beaumont, Edgar Bergen, Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, Bobby Driscoll and others that promoted the film, computer games, deleted scenes, songs and related materials, and went into moratorium in January 2009.

A year and two months later, Disney released a 2-disc special "Un-Anniversary" edition DVD on March 30, 2010 to promote the recent Tim Burton version.

[83] Bosley Crowther, reviewing for The New York Times, complimented that "...if you are not too particular about the images of Carroll and Tenniel, if you are high on Disney whimsey and if you'll take a somewhat slow, uneven pace, you should find this picture entertaining.

"[84] Mae Tinee of the Chicago Tribune wrote that "While the Disney figures do resemble John Tenniel's famous sketches, they abound in energy but are utterly lacking in enchantment, and seem more closely related to Pluto, the clumsy pup, than the products of Carroll's imagination.

Youngsters probably will find it a likable cartoon, full of lively characters, with Alice's dream bedecked with just a touch of nightmare—those who cherish the old story as I have probably will be distinctly disappointed.

"[90] Animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston also considered the film a failure and stated on their website that they felt "none of us could fully capture the characters of Lewis Carrol's imagination.

The consensus states, "A good introduction to Lewis Carroll's classic, Alice in Wonderland boasts some of the Disney canon's most surreal and twisted images.

More famously, five of the six Disneyland-style theme parks feature Mad Tea Party, a teacups ride based on Disney's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.

[103] The now-defunct Mickey Mouse Revue, shown at Walt Disney World and later at Tokyo Disneyland, contained characters and scenes from the film.

On 25 May 2024, a limited-run stage show Alice and the Queen of Hearts: Back to Wonderland opened in the Theater of the Stars in Walt Disney Studios Park at Disneyland Paris.