Curious Alice
Jefferson Airplane, the leading band of San Francisco’ s acid-rock scene, recruited Lewis Carroll’s fantastical Alice stories to the psychedelic cause on their 1967 smash single “White Rabbit”. Singer Grace Slick beseeches curious-minded youth to “remember what the dormouse said / feed your head!” and dive deep into a hallucinatory world where “logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead”. Released the following year, “Curious Alice” reversed the Airplane’s gambit and turned Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland into a cautionary tale. Alice fends off a bong-puffing caterpillar, a pep-pill-popping March Hare, a drowsy dormouse zonked on downers, and a Mad Hatter proffering a sugar cube laced with LSD. But the film may well have subverted its own deterrent intent, so enchanting and seductive is its unusual animation style, which blends stop-motion (still photos of facial expressions from a real girl) and drawn-and-painted imagery (Alice’s clothes and hair and body, backdrops, and the other characters). It’s easy to imagine that some kids who saw it may have connected it to already pretty trippy and surreal children’s entertainments of the era (like The Phantom Tollbooth, or Bedknobs and Broomsticks), and come away with the impression that these naughty highs had something going for them. (The film was apparently distributed to schools in the early Seventies complete with a colouring book and a comprehension test to see how much the kids had learned). Beyond the fact that it was commissioned by the Mental Health Administration of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, and produced by a Washington, D.C.-based company called Design Center Inc., there’s scant information out there about who scripted or designed “Curious Alice”, nor indeed about who created its wonderfully dinky electronic soundtrack. Incidentally, the Alice in Dangerland concept was reprised by another late Sixties anti-drug film worth checking out: Alice in Acidland (1969), a campy slice of psychedelic cheesecake whose gratuitous nudity is barely veiled by its overt moralising message.
Simon Reynolds
