Ekphrasis in Disneyland: The Alice in Wonderland Ride (1958)

The Alice in Wonderland ride in Disneyland, which opened in 1958, was designed to place visitors inside the action, as if seeing things through Alice’s eyes. It drew on the film and on concept artwork, as well as the Lewis Carroll book; and can be seen as a transmedial work, which utilised a complex set of media elements. It can also be considered ekphrastic, in the way it referred to source media texts, but elaborated on them, and repurposed them.

The concept of ekphrasis has traditionally been applied to verbal representations of visual art works. Modern theoretical approaches, however, have challenged the idea that language is the only acceptable target medium; the concept has been applied to different media products, including films, music videos, video games, etc. Cecilia Lindhé (2016) has emphasized the ancient Greco-Roman understanding of ekphrasis, which highlighted the question of enargeia: the imaginative and physical response in the reader or viewer. The Alice ride was like a journey through a strange dream, a series of random, even surreal encounters; it exemplified the concept of enargeia, in making visitors feel, not only as if they were present at events, but that it was happening to them.