Alice & Mary Blair: Two Cool Ladies

Like any semi-grown twenty-something, Disney movies made a huge impact on my upbringing and the colorful scenes of all those animated feature films set a fire within my imagination. I will gladly belt out any song from Beauty and the Beast at any given moment with gusto. When I watch any of these movies at home (which is way more often than my husband wants to admit), it's basically a sing-along for me.

Don't even get me started on Frozen because that soundtrack is on repeat in my iTunes library on a daily basis.


LET IT GO!

LET IT GO!

CAN'T HOLD IT BACK ANYMORE!

LET IT GO!

LET IT GOOOoOooOOOO!

TURN MY BACK AND SLAM THE DOOR!

OK, I got myself started. My bizzle.

Over the years, I've been working on recreating my vast Disney movie collection with Blu-Ray discs and DVDs. I reason with myself that this will be for my future children so that they too can sing, dance, and relive Disney magic in all its animated glory.

Really, though, this is all for me because the hard facts about being an adult happen to be:

1) It's not that fun.
2) You spend a lot of time wishing you were still a kid.

I have all of the 90's classics, but it has been a little more challenging to find some of my older Disney favorites. When I saw Alice in Wonderland on DVD for a mere 10 bucks at the store, I jumped for joy and purchased it immediately.

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I loved watching Alice as a kid. I watched this videotape (That's a black square box with the film on spindles, for you young folk.) so many times that it broke when I was in second or third grade. Without the Internet to help me find a digital copy and then only remembering this wonderful animated feature intermittently, I have not watched Alice for five, ten OK, fine, eighteen years.

I honestly just loved that Alice was a curious little girl with a really cute cat. She wasn't trying to find true love. She wasn't interested in becoming a princess. She just liked to create her own imaginary worlds.

Sure, she wasn't particularly smart or clever (Who seriously drinks a beverage that says "DRINK ME" on it? That's a bad situation waiting to happen and that situation has already happened at many-a-fraternity party I'm SURE.) but she was very intrepid, plucky, and downright curious.

Oh, and did I mention the most important point already? She had a cat. That spoke straight to my heart.

I always imagined what the "Drink Me" shrinking elixir would taste like - maybe a cross between guava nectar and sweet cream. Or those "Eat Me" growing biscuits - they reminded me of vanilla wafer cookies. The singing, snooty flowers gave me a chance to appreciate a garden, because god knows I've always hated yard work (Sorry, Dad).

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I wanted to live so badly in the White Rabbit's pink house with the grandfather clock that had bunny ears and the little carrot garden outside his window. I would always get so upset when Giant Alice wrecked his perfectly pink home with her obnoxious tendency to just eat things that weren't hers (ugh).

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And yes, the movie is kind of crazy. It's like a rainbow kaleidoscope exploded with talking animals, doorknobs, and playing cards. If you've read Lewis Carroll's Alice books, you'll know that some of the elements in the story are not only weird, but straight up bizarre. It only makes sense that the animated film would also be kind of nutso, but I love everything about it still.

Imagine my surprise and delight to find that the concept artist for this beloved movie has been honored for Women's History Month because, you know, Mary Blair was a woman and deserves some recognition for keeping it real with so many of the male Disney animators and artists of her time.

 

How perfect is it that one of my favorite Disney films about a young, non-princess girl in a colorfully vibrant and flair-tastic world was artistically rendered by a woman? There just isn't enough astrology in the universe to illustrate how perfectly wonderful and fortuitous this is.