Imagination and "Alice"

     Imagination is an important thing. And is something that is usually attributed to children. Children are inherently imaginative and this imagination generally fades as the child grows. Give a child a stick and he will make it into a gun or sword. Give an adult a stick and he will throw it on the ground. Why that is, I have no answer. Through the imagination, we are able to "do" things we normally cannot. I feel like the song "Pure Imagination," sung by Willy Wonka, is very apt at describing imagination is and does.

     One verse of the song goes: "We'll begin with a spin. Traveling in the world of my creation. What we'll see will defy explanation." With our imagination, we can create new worlds. And this is obvious in Alice. In this film, Alice is playing in her room, when she begins to imagine and create a new world around her. She sees her taxidermy rabbit and pretends that it comes to life. She then follows the rabbit into a new world that defies explanation. The majority of the world is created from things in her room, imagined to be new and different. (Though, I am suspicious as to where the bones and skeletons came from). At the end of the film, after she has finished imagining, she is back in her room. Also, when people imagine and play pretend, they always do it in their own head and own voice. Alice voicing the characters further reinforces the idea that Alice is imagining all of this.

     Willy Wonka continues, singing the next verse: "There is no life I know to compare with pure imagination. Living there you'll be free if you truly wish to be." We can see this at play in the short "A Shadow of Blue." Unable to reach her paper butterfly, a young girl realizes that her shadow has a different reach than she does. So she imagines her shadow getting up and chasing her origami. At the end, we realize that the little girl is wheelchair bound and could not do any of the things we saw her shadow do. But, she does do feel caged, confined to her wheelchair. Because of her imagination, she is free. She is free to do things that she could not do in the real world. She could be mopey and sit on the bench doing nothing, feeling sad for herself. But, she realizes that her legs are not the only way she can move. Her imagination releases her from the here and now and allows her to be free.

     Our imagination allows us to do things and be things that we could not do or be otherwise. Without an imagination, Alice would have been stuck in her room with a dead rabbit, instead of going on a wonderful adventure. Likewise, the wheelchair bound girl would not have been able to chase her paper butterfly were it not for her imagination. Imagining things cannot replace actually doing things. But, it's impossible to actually do everything, but it is not impossible to imagine them.