Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland predates the invention of cinema by a couple of decades. Nevertheless, much like the “Drink me” bottle and “Eat me” presented to its young protagonist, Lewis Carroll’s fantastical tale has called out the same message to generations of filmmakers around the world: “Adapt me.” This century, though not even a quarter of the way over, has already brought us full-length Alice movies (to say nothing of television productions) from Europe, South America, and of course the United States. Those last include separate adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass by no less an auteur than Tim Burton.
Both of those books were also taken on by a writer-director named W. W. Young more than a century ago, though he simply combined portions of both novels into a single feature. You can watch this silent Alice in Wonderland from 1915 above, in a version its uploader calls “by far the highest quality version of this film on the internet,” assembled “primarily from two prints scanned by the Library of Congress, along with a few other sources.



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