Edit: 1/08. Lost half a star.
I can't help wondering what I would have made of this movie if I weren't so familiar with the original book. Taking that further, I wonder what I would have made of it if I were a child and wasn't familiar with the book. I'm pretty sure that after about 10 minutes I'd be asking myself, "what the hell is this about?"
The original 'Alice in Wonderland' was, of course, an outrageous political and social satire, much in the same way that 'Gulliver's Travels' had been a couple of hundred years earlier. That never stopped them being great fun as pure adventure stories without the subtext, and it didn't stop people making good movies of them (in fact both 'Gulliver' and 'Alice' were the subject of exceptionally good TV mini-series in the late 90's). Given that modern Disney movies usually have an 'adult track' as well as a children's one, it's ironic that they should so totally eschew any adult content in a story which is overflowing with it. But that's not really their fault, of course. References to Victorian politics would hardly have amused the average adult in 1951.
What you can't excuse Disney for is making such a dog's breakfast of the children's adventure part of the film. I remember being totally sucked in to the Alice stories when they were read to me as a child. Let's face it - to a kid the thing is a trip. But the scenes were developed and paced such that they each had space to breathe, and seemed to flow on from each other in some sort of logical fashion. In Disney's rendering, Alice merely endures a sequence of increasingly bizarre and unrelated events, fired off at machine-gun pace.
If ever there were a film that begged for some judicious editing of the source material (something Disney isn't normally shy about), this is it. What earthly purpose does the Walrus and Carpenter sequence serve, as introduced by Tweedle-Dee/Dum? "Well, that was a completely pointless little story told by two completely pointless characters. See you later."
To be blunt, Disney's writers were totally at sea with this movie. They just didn't know what to do with Carroll's story, and they made a real hash of it. It isn't supposed to simply be a chaotic sequence of events. There is an internal order to the thing. What's more, for a kid's film, this has no message, no meaning. The best that could be said is that it's mildly entertaining now and then.
Furthermore, it has some of the most truly wretched songs ever to 'grace' a Disney film., and Alice has a terribly weak voice which can hardly hold a tune.
On the plus side - and there are some plusses, taken in isolation - the animation is better than anything they would do in the 60's or 70's - the scenes with the playing-card soldiers in particular are very well done, and the visual character design is usually very good (though Alice herself is terribly uninteresting).
That's about it, though.
Disney had just returned to making animated features after a hiatus of nearly ten years, and this is a million miles from the quality of their early 40's movies. Fortunately they would come storming back with their next two movies, 'Peter Pan' and 'Lady and the Tramp', and even though they made some pretty ordinary stuff over the next few decades, it would be nearly two generations before they made anything as bad as this again.
It's not quite the worst animated feature Disney ever made, but you can definately see the bottom of the barrel from here.