No time to say "hello." Goodbye! I'm late, I'm late, I'm late!

I'm watching Alice in Wonderland on Toon Disney right now--she's just now going to the tea party with the Mad Hatter--and it makes me wonder: how do classics become classics? Who decides what a classic is? And do all classics have similar qualities? Is there an unofficial classic rubric? A selection committee? And, really, what makes Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland a classic? And is it more of a classic than the Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and, for that matter, Alice Through the Looking Glass? I'm not a fan of the book Alice, but now that I watch the film version, I'm very fond of it, although I was terrified of it as a child. I think it's much easier to follow than the book and makes...well, it doesn't quite make sense, but it makes more sense than the book does, in my opinion.

"If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn't be, and what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?"

There are some fabulous things in the movie. Like that quote, above, which Alice says to Dinah, her kitten. The colors are fantastic and the animation is really lovely, which is probably what attracts a lot of children. The color surprised me, actually, even though this is probably a remastered version and the color has been "fixed" since its 1951 release. They are really vibrant! They pop! And it's musical-esque. That is to say that it does have music, much more than I remembered from my childhood experience. I mean, everyone remembers the rabbit's song, but do you remember the Walrus and the Carpenter song that Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum sing? What about the singing flowers? And Alice sings too. I was pleasantly surprised, I have to say.

"The time has come, my little friends, to talk of other things / Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings / And why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wigs / Calloo, Callay, come run away / With the cabbages and kings."

So, what makes a classic, a classic? What is a classic and what isn't, and what makes it so? I think a classic--at least, a children's classic--has to be something that (obviously) appeals to children, which I think is where Alice in Wonderland and a lot of the more fantastic children's books and movies have the market cornered. Children are so open to believing things that couldn't possibly be real, like Alice, and yet as they grow and mature, they begin to question the things they had once believed in, just as Alice does in Wonderland. In this way, classics are relevant, even if they aren't necessarily "believable." I think children also can appreciate the silliness embodied by a character like the Mad Hatter, and they can still laugh at the hoity toity White Rabbit, the door knob, etc. A classic also needs to be clear and "followable," which the movie Alice does very well, I think. And then there are the characters, the exceedingly memorable characters: the Queen of Hearts, the pipe-smoking Caterpillar, the White Rabbit, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter. I think, ultimately these characters and the journey that they take the protagonist on are the keys to any good book or movie, and a classic, most of all. After all, if you can't remember it, why bother?

"Off with their heads!"