DREAMCHILD

Dreamchild in VHS videocassette format (© Gavin Millar/PFH Films - reproduced here on a strictly non -commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

On 14 April 2017, I watched Dreamchild on DVD, a classic 1985 British movie directed by Gavin Millar. It provides a fictionalised account of how the original Alice (Alice Liddell, 1852-1934), who inspired Lewis Carroll's immortal children's books Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass  (1871), visited New York when she was 80 years old to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Carroll's birth.

That did happen, but in the film it is interspersed throughout with flashbacks to when she was a child and also with several fantasy sequences in which Alice both as a girl and as the elderly lady (the latter played superbly by Coral Browne) encounters some of the Wonderland characters. Their creator, the painfully shy, stuttering Lewis Carroll (aka the Reverend Charles Dodgson), is brought to the screen with great aplomb by Ian Holm.

As for his characters, these are played by life-sized human-containing puppets produced by muppet creator Jim Henson's Creatures Workshop, but if you're expecting cute Kermit/Fozzie Bear-type creatures, think again! Instead, they're grotesque, sometimes hideous, monstrous entities that look, speak, and behave as if they've escaped from a Stephen King nightmare, most notably the March Hare and the (very) Mad Hatter.

Disney this ain't, that's for sure! But bearing in mind that the film was written by Dennis Potter, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised by that.

 

If you'd like to see an official trailer for Dreamchild, click here to view one on YouTube.

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