Malice In Wonderland – the Trippy Cartoon Inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Story, 1982

“These days, it’s, ‘Dude, what the fuck is that shit?’ Whereas back then, it was, ‘You are exploiting women, you filthy sexist pig!'”

– Vince Collins on his shot animation Malice In Wonderland

 

 

When Vince Collins made Malice in Wonderland in 1982, his hallucinatory, imaginative and experimental take on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it was badly received. “It got booed,” says Collins. “These days, it’s, ‘Dude, what the fuck is that shit?’ Collins told Vice in 2009. “Whereas back then, it was, ‘You are exploiting women, you filthy sexist pig!'”

Not that infamy and success followed the film Collins drew and painted by hand. “Malice in Wonderland was actually the least known film I had made, as it turns out, because most of the theatres that showed independent films had disappeared by that point,” he adds. “There were no VHS or DVDs, you had to be there to see It… Then 25 years later it started appearing on YouTube and got more views per day than it did in its entire theatrical career.”

To racy for VHS in the 1980s, this burst of sexualised animated nudity is now ok for corporate America online. “Maybe it’s not considered one now,” says Collins, “but it was a porno then.”

“Sex has some really good shapes and actions for animation” he says. “Most of my stuff is a non-stop flow of images, start to finish – non-stop climaxes, involving the entire screen without a background/foreground concept. The Alice in Wonderland story has some great opportunities for this type of animation. Once, Malice in Wonderland was rented by a woman’s club by mistake to show at their meeting. There was an actual occurrence of “the aghast audience running from the room”. On the upside, when Malice was in post-production, the guy there told me that it was the only time his crew of tape machine operators had ever actually watched one of the projects they were working on.”