“Mickey in Aliceland”, Extra Series, No. XX

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense” – Alice

Being born in the days of the blossoming invention of home entertainment, my babysitter was often my Nintendo and VHS/Betamax system. I was quite obsessive by nature even as a child, and needed consistent repetitive entertainment to soothe out the often chaotic imaginations in my head. There were five distinct movies in my childhood that I played over and over again until the tapes broke. They were:

1. Big Trouble in Little China
2. The Fantastic Adventures of Unico
3. Labyrinth
4. The Dark Crystal
5. Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland was the type of movie that I played over and over again in one sitting. Once the movie was finished, I’d get up, rewind the tape all the way back to the beginning and watch it again. I did this for hours in a day. Looking back it was amazing what that film would do to my reality. I so desperately wanted to live somewhere else than the reality of my childhood, that I would often ‘black out’ into another world that made me feel that everything was going to be ok.

The minute the tape went on, everything disapated away from me slowly. The tables and lamps would softly erase themselves, and the windows and walls would quietly whisper away. All the carpet around me would blip out softly, leaving me on this small patch of a flying carpet in deep astral space, floating quietly in front of a television set locked on to my eyes. … and finally. I’d become swallowed into the black hole of swirling stars into the television set… and my world… would suddenly become Alice’s world.

When I watched Alice in Wonderland, my existence as a child suddenly had wonderment and life. I did not feel ashamed of my overflowing imagination, and in fact, felt quite proud that what I thought about existed in this world. In essence, Alice in Wonderland was the movie that made me feel safe as child, and validated as a dreamer.

I felt quite akin to the character itself, for as a child I didn’t think there was anything wrong with Alice and her want for a personal world where all of her books would be nothing but pictures. Even as an adult, the quote  “….but that’s just the trouble with me. I give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it.”  rings with understanding. I found identity in her as a child, and even now as an adult.

In this painting, which is the FIRST of the Disney History Section, I wanted to embody the entirety of the film.  This painting is self explanatory in all the story details of each sector, but as an entirety I really wanted to focus on the wonderment and friendly chaos that the film has.  This is entitled “Alice in Mickeyland”, in where Alice is dreaming of Mickey as an oracle mouse creating different scenarios around the circumference of his head.