"Curious Alice" is one of the strangest educational films ever made. While it apparently was meant for kids, it really looks like a film meant for stoners, as kids would have been incredibly confused when they saw this bizarro film.The story is a reworking of "Alice in Wonderland". While Lewis Carroll's original story abounded with drug imagery, it wasn't so obvious. Here, however, Alice wanders through a strange place where folks keep offering her a wide variety of dangerous and illegal drugs. The voice of Alice is a young girl and the animation is very peculiar but effective. It's very trippy and strange...which fits the story. However, the language the film uses and the confusing POSSIBLY anti- drug message is muddled...making it of dubious value to anyone except, perhaps, college-aged drug users...most of which would have just laughed at the message. Odd to say the least!

This is an education film for public school children, about drugs, narcotics, psychedelics, alcohol, amphetamines, and barbiturates abuse in the context of the Alice In Wonderland story.The version I watched of this short film was on YouTube. I am not sure what other sources there may be, possibly floating around on compilations of old educational strips. We know there are plenty of drivers ed films out there. Either way, I would love to see someone clean this up a little bit and get it out there in a new form.This is such a strange film. It purports to be anti-drug, and yet comes across as being very "trippy". I am not now nor have I ever been a user of hallucinogenics, but this seems like exactly the sort of thing they would watch while using drugs. So, I surmise it failed miserably in its purpose.

This is an educational, semi-industrial U.S. government sponsored film springing from an anti-drug genre common to the late 1960s-early 1970s. Supposed to warn young people off drugs, it serves the message up with attractive and well made psychedelic visuals that only serve to subvert the stated purpose and intention. Most remarkable is the integration of black and white stills of the actress speaking the dialog that is animated along with the cels; how did they do that? Through photos printed on reversal film? Anyway, "Curious Alice" is about as technically secure and as imaginative as classroom films ever got; the synthesizer track -- which may be a composite of music from more than one source -- is a pioneering bit of synch that's among the first of its kind. But one downside is that, as an adaptation of the literary classic by Lewis Carroll, it is poor and tasteless. They are not outwardly trying to transmit Carroll's work, but they do as the writer pulls a little too much out of the source to establish it as a wholly independent work. The song "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane with its exhortation to "feed your head" was a likely stimulus for this film, as it was for other projects that warned against recreational drug use. As a purely visual and audio phenomenon, "Curious Alice" is so extraordinary that it belongs to the canon of the avant-garde, but as message it is too mixed, and were I a teacher in 1968 I would not have shown it to any class of students; it's just too irresponsible.

Curious Alice (1968) ** 1/2 (out of 4) You know you're in trouble when the U.S. Department of Health produces a movie that ends up being distributed by Something Weird Video forty-years after it was made. This is a take-off on Alice in Wonderland as a young girl (named Alice of course) starts to get curious about the various "bad" things in her mommy's cabinets. Soon this curiosity leads her to Wonderland where she sees a wide range of creatures doing bad drugs. If you want a serious take on drug abuse then it's best you don't show this thing to your kids because after viewing it I'd say that the majority of people will be wanting to light up a joint. This isn't a smart or intelligent look at drug abuse and in all reality it really seems as if someone made it to drop some acid to. The animation is actually very nice looking in its own right and the way it tries to create various hallucinations was very effective and I'd say this here is something that will appeal to those who like to watch certain items while out of their minds. At 11-minutes the thing certainly drags in spots but there's enough going on here to watch it once if you enjoy seeing this anti-drug movies that usually go against their own cause.