Alice in Transmedia Wonderland: Curiouser and Curiouser New Forms of a Children’s Classic by Anna Kérchy (review)

The 150th anniversary of the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) has garnered much attention from fans, scholars, and academics alike, with an incredible number of newly illustrated editions, adaptations, and many scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) books on Lewis Carroll’s Alices coming out around 2015.

Anna Kérchy’s Alice in Transmedia Wonderland tackles the daunting task of examining the virtually countless postmillennial adaptations of the original Alice tales—and, as becomes more and more obvious, rewritings of the Lewis Carroll myth as well. Kérchy chooses not to limit herself to one form of adaptation (book-to-screen, book-to-digital media, book-to-stage, and so forth), as she wishes “to trace transmedia interconnections and metamedial self-reflexivity across a variety of representational methods” (2). The variety of media in her corpus reveals her broad understanding of what an Alice adaptation is. She includes films, pop-up books, digital picture books, computer games, young adult novels, musicals, choreographic and other artistic homages, but also bio-fictions, a mock-cookbook, and chef Heston Blumenthal’s “culinary art-project” (219). What seems to fascinate the Hungarian scholar is the multimedia dissemination of the Alice-inspired myth(s), as is made clear when she devotes several pages to Neil Gaiman’s 2002 dark fantasy children’s novella Coraline, Russell Craig’s 2008 graphic novel adaptation, and Henry Selick’s 2009 stop-motion adaptation of Gaiman’s novella. This focus is likewise seen when she retraces the connections between Carroll’s Alice books, Jan Švankmajer’s 1988 Alice, Angela Carter’s 1989 short-story “Alice in Prague or the Curious Room,” which the British author wrote with Švankmajer’s movie in mind, and Rikki Ducornet’s 1993 The Jade Cabinet.

This passage from media to media is the main reason why Kérchy uses the term “transmedia” in the title of her book. Though she quotes Henry Jenkins’s definition of the term, which emphasizes the fact that “integral elements of fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience [where] each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story”, she implicitly broadens its scope and downplays the systematic and coordinated aspects of transmedia storytelling mentioned by Jenkins (22, my italics). According to Kérchy, every adaptation sheds new light on the previous one, thereby creating a web of new interpretations of the Alice tales and/or the Lewis Carroll myth.

The introduction posits that the amazing number and variety of adaptations result from the ambiguity of the original tales, which Kérchy infers from the Alice books’ “generic hybridity,” nonsense, and in fine the multifarious interpretations of the Alice books by scholars (4–5). She also suggests, like Zoe Jaques and Eugene Giddens in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass: A Publishing History (2013), that it is very fitting that these books came to be adapted so frequently as their author kept revising them. Finally, she contends that all the Alice adaptations examined are, to some extent, metafictional—or involve “meta” aspects that are worth analyzing, Alice being “an agent of metafantasy and metamediality who offers a critical commentary on the dynamic interaction of artistic media and creative imagination” (18).

The first chapter deals with what an Alice adaptation looks like after “the pictorial or iconic turn” of the late twentieth century (27). Kérchy first shows the connections between Carroll’s elaborate exploitation of the text-image relationship in his Alices; the pop-up book adaptations by Benjamin Lacombe, Robert Sabuda, Zdenko Basic, and Harriet Castor; and the digital Alices. She then tries to rehabilitate Walt Disney’s 1951 and Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland oft-reviled adaptations by showing how Disney’s visual “nonsense” can be said to make up for Carroll’s...