Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Forget the cartoon version! Dale's expert handling of the characters in Carroll's classic banishes any preconceived voice characterizations from the listener's mind. The old favorites are all here: Alice, the Queen, the Caterpillar, and so on. However, there's more to it than just those few. Carroll's absurd landscape is populated with equally absurd characters, many of them with only a line or two. Dale takes these bit parts and gives them true personalities that might have been ignored in other productions. Moreover, Dale's approach to the story narration bears the kindly, slightly amused tone that one imagines Carroll himself had as he penned his much-loved tale. In a Disneyfied world, one forgets how quirky and delightfully peculiar this story really is--but now Jim Dale has brought us back to Wonderland. A.A. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

March 1, 2002
An edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll contains all of Arthur Rackham's original artwork from the 1907 edition (published after Sir John Tenniel's illustrations). Pen-and-inks dot the text; full-page paintings, such as one sepia-toned frame showing Alice, in a delicate rose-patterned dress, addressing the hookah-smoking Caterpillar, plus a sewn-in satin bookmark make this an elegant gift choice.

The time-honored puns, delightful logic, and surreal scenes in ALICE weave in and out of contemporary animations, commercials, rock videos and, most recently, computer games. To narrate the work is to take on the daunting task of performing a well-known classic. Narrator David Horovitch and a host of London-based voice talents read their parts with almost too much reverence. They know it is a classic and deliver it as such, making these fine performances sound slightly rote. The Queen sounds angry. The caterpillar--sleepy. Alice--very Victorian. It all has the nineteenth-century feel of adults presenting children's literature to children. Somewhere out there Lewis Carroll may be responding with a Cheshire smile. B.P. (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine