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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a pretty well-known work: it can be associated with world-crossing fantasy, drug imagery, lolita fashion and other aspects of Victorian England, political satire, and who knows what else. No wonder it shows up a lot in anime, shock horror (it's a frequent target of Grimmification, usually with lots of blood), and emo teen novels. (You know the kind — usually involving vampires, eating disorders, or vampires with eating disorders.)
The name "Alice", when used in a reference to Alice in Wonderland, therefore tends to be used for fantastical, ethereal characters or concepts, and that goes double if her last name is a variation on Carroll or Liddell. Dolls are also often involved, presumably by their association with the Victorian era.
Allusions like this tend to rather dark and grim, but this makes a lot of sense considering their original source. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel are full of Black Comedy (although the death jokes and the like in the books tend to be subtle), something that can often surprise someone who reads the original versions.
Other frequent references to Alice in Wonderland include magical white rabbits, rabbit-holes, play-card iconography, and so forth. If her appearance is shown or described, she'll most likely look like a little blonde girl wearing a blue and white dress, as popularized in the Disney animated adaptation.
Adaptations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are not part of this trope. Allusions, however, are.
Note that this trope is only for cases where a clear connection can be made between the name "Alice" and a reference to Alice in Wonderland. This trope is not intended to be a general list of every work (or even every fantasy or fantastical work) containing anyone named Alice, only when that name is clearly used in an effort to evoke the book. If you can't make a clear connection to Alice and Wonderland beyond the name "Alice" and a fantasy or magical-realism genre, don't list it here.
Conversely, references to Alice in Wonderland can be listed even if they don't specifically use the name "Alice", since they are not a distinct trope.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Alice McCoy, the mysterious, possibly dead Deus ex Machina of Digimon Tamers. She's also a blonde gothloli, for extra points. Writer Chiaki J. Konaka favours this trope.
- In Gakuen Alice, the gift that gives people supernatural powers is called Alice. This is deliberately supposed to invoke Alice in Wonderland, as the currency is called "rabbits" and the main character is trapped at a Wizarding School chasing someone who's evading her.
- Fujisaki Arisu of Kidou Tenshi Angelic Layer names her Angel, Alice, after herself. This does not explain why the Angel is dressed as a classic lolita
 with blonde hair and white bunny ears.
- The Alice Game from Rozen Maiden, the deadly tournament and reason for being of eight beautifully made Victorian dolls. They are guided by a white rabbit demon in a tuxedo. There's also lots of roses and tea parties.
- Pandora Hearts has a rabbit character named Alice along with some other Alice in Wonderland-related imagery.
- That is quite an understatement. The amount of Alice Allusions are far too many to list here, but suffice to say, practically every event, theme, character and idea from the books shall be referenced in some way, though it probably won't be obvious to the reader unless they have a very good knowledge of the books. The plots even sort of parallel at times, so in some ways the series could be described as a darker, more complex take on the books. As well as this, some references are even made to Carroll and the real-life Alice, Alice Liddell.
- Alice 19th, where the protagonist (who has magical powers) is called Alice and her guide/teacher takes the form of a white rabbit. The magic system? Based on wordplay...
- Alice Mizuki from Serial Experiments Lain, as confirmed by Word Of God: Writer Chiaki J. Konaka states "Alice" is Lewis Carol's (sic). I often use the "Alice" as the metaphor in my scenarios. Alice in "lain" is same.
- An episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX has a creepy doll named Alice.
- "Arusu (Aluce?)", from Tweeny Witches. Ellis, in at least one translation.
- Alice Carroll from ARIA — look at her full name, even.
- The first episode of the Petshop Of Horrors anime (she doesn't show up until later in the manga) features a white rabbit named Alice, who is given to a pair of grieving parents whose only daughter died of a drug overdose. The "new" Alice also ends up dying, in a truly horrific way.
- Arisu Sakaguchi from Please Save My Earth is named after Alice from Alice in Wonderland, but her parents actually made up kanji to spell it with rather than using katakana.
- Project ARMS has all ARMS named after characters from the Alice books. Later, it is revealed that one of the Egrigori team members and experimental child is a blonde girl named Alice (she even reads Alice in Wonderland to the other children at one point). after she is absorbed by an alien life form, she refers to the world she creates as Wonderland.
- The Ending Theme for Vampire Knight, "Still Doll", starts off with the lyrics "Hi, Miss Alice" in English, with the rest of the lyrics seeming to be about a melancholy young girl. The song is sung by Kanon Wakeshima, an Elegant Gothic Lolita, and the Music Video is full of spooky Victorian atmosphere.
- King Of Thorn has a Mysterious Waif named Alice. Naturally, when she needs a protector, she creates one in the form of a giant white rabbit.
- Are You Alice? the protagonist strays to Wonderland and was given the name Alice, and is about to join the "Game to Kill the White Rabbit". Is there a need to mention that Alice and the Queen of Hearts are both male? Talk about Rules Don't Apply Here.
- Kagihime Monogatari has Arisu/Alice Arisugawa as its main character, and the series in general is drowning in Wonderland motifs.
- Heart no Kuni no Alice
- In Black Blood Brothers the vampire that turned the main character is a source blood named Alice. She appears in flash backs and occasional references but she died ten years before the start of the series.
- No use of the name Alice, but Ouran High School Host Club contains an episode titled "Haruhi in Wonderland". The contents of the episode are exactly what the title implies.
- Kyousogiga is supposed to be based off Through the Looking-Glass, though you'd have a hard time knowing it if not for the whole "finding the rabbit" gig, chess imagery, and quotes from the books.
- An episode of Cardcaptor Sakura invokes this by having Sakura wear the dress while having to catch a rabbit-shaped Clow Card.
- No mention of Alice, but Miyuki-chan in Wonderland is a parody wherein a teenage girl has several Homoerotic Dreams, and includes the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, the cards painting the roses red, the White Rabbit, and the Mad Tea Party.
- Code Geass has an OVA where the cast act out the tale of Alice in Wonderland.
- In the 2001 version of Cyborg 009, Joe befriends a tiny Strange Girl named Alice who seems to know a looooot about him. She's a Time Traveller.
Comics
- The main character in Lullaby is named Alice, and dresses as you might expect. The series begins with her parents dying in a car accident after swerving to avoid a white rabbit in the road.
- Lullaby somewhat blurs the line between allusion and adaptation though due to its crossover nature.
- Alice in Sunderland is a brilliant exploration of the history of the character of Alice, among many other subject, by Bryan Talbot.
- Alice is the name of a villain in Greg Rucka's Batwoman run, who speaks almost entirely in quotes from Lewis Carroll's Alice stories.
- Another Batfamily rogue counts as an inversion. The Mad Hatter is obsessed with finding "his" Alice, who likely isn't much more than a figment of his insane imaginings.
- There's also the cousins Tweedledee and Tweedledum. In fact, Batman seems to have a large amount of Lewis Carroll themed villains in his rogues gallery. He even has Humpty Dumpty!
- There's also the Teen Titans villainess Cheshire.
- Marvel Comics has its own Lewis Carroll themed villain, the White Rabbit. At least for a while, she was written as an utter joke of a villain, meaning she could be a Take That against other Alice inspired villains.
- A minor sympathetic villain in the Astro City comic calls himself "The Mock Turtle" and is a huge fan of Carroll's novels.
- Doctor Strange's mystical ally Agamotto appears to him as a giant caterpillar on an equally-large mushroom, smoking a hookah. Justified, since Agamotto assumes A Form You Are Comfortable With out of Strange's memories of Alice in Wonderland.
Films — Live-Action
- The Resident Evil movies' main character is named Alice, and in the first film there's a supercomputer called the Red Queen with a little girl as its avatar.
- In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, Alice is a Deceptively Human Robot. With some degree of naughty tentacles *
(but she's got nothing on Soundwave) . In the adaptations, it's stated that she scanned her disguise from an Alice in Wonderland animatronic.
- A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master has Alice Johnson, who over the course of the film acquaints herself with spectacular control over dreams ("Wonderland" anyone?), and faces her newly-uncovered looking glass before her final showdown with Fred Krueger (who she defeats by showing him a shard from a mirror).
- Taken further in the comicbook Nightmares on Elm Street, as Freddy traps Alice into a dreamscape resembling Aice in Wonderland and for the climax takes the form of Jabberwocky.
- The Avengers (1998) has a Ministry agent named Alice. This is just one of the five Shout Outs to Alice in Wonderland in the movie.
- There's also the Woody Allen film entitled Alice. It's the main character's name, and definitely playing with the Alice in Wonderland thing.
- John Carpenter's The Ward, a story set in an insane asylum with a toy rabbit as a plot point, has Alice as the name of a ghost that apparently haunts the asylum but then it is revealed Alice is the protagonist's real name...
- After the identity swap in Lost Highway, Eddie encounters a doppelganger of Renee. Her name, "Alice Wakefield", seems to refer to "Alice in Wonderland", and to imply that Alice and Eddie are alternate universe, "down the rabbit-hole" versions of Fred and Renee.
- The Sight, stars Andrew McCarthy as Michael Lewis, an architect who ends up following a child murderer across London with the help of the dead. There are a lot of Alice references, such as Lewis being hired to work on the Hatter's Hotel and Alice being the name of one of the victims.
- The Matrix has its ever so famous speech about the red pill or the blue. "You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
- And of course, "follow the white rabbit"
- Sucker Punch has a lot of this. Babydoll looks similar to Alice, white rabbit images appear everywhere, and the song "White Rabbit" plays during the WWI sequence.
Literature
- Alice Samara of Michelle Latiolais' A Proper Knowledge is known for her intriguingly unconventional floral sculptures and becomes the Manic Pixie Dream Girl for Luke, the brooding male protagonist.
- Neil Gaiman's short story Keepsakes and Treasures, as well as The Monarch of the Glade contains a Mr. Alice.
- French-Canadian horror novel Aliss by Patrick Sénécal is a very dark, gory and sexually explicit retelling of Alice in Wonderland. Wonderland is a strange neighbourhood in Montreal, the white rabbit is a ashamed pedophiliac based on Lewis Carroll, the Red Queen is a sadistic bordello owner and the Cheshire Cat is smiling junkie. Yeesh.
- The Mad Hatter and the March Hare are lovers, their names are Bone and Chair ("Bone" is from the English and "Chair" is French from "Flesh" and they kill and dissect people to prove that humans have no souls.) The Knave of Heart is Alice's lover (at least, from her point of view.) The Catterpillar (called "Verrue" which mean "Wart") is a drug addict junkie who think that he'll became a butterfly one day. (Even if he's human like all the others characters.)The Duchess and the White Queen are fused into one character who's name is Andromaque; she's also a a bordello owner but she's nicer and more classy than the Red Queen... And she always talk in rhymes. The Cheshire cat (called Chess) is not just a regular smiling junkie. He's a smiling junkie whose only drug is souls of dying humans!!
- In Girl in the Shadows by VC Andrews, the protagonist was named Alice in the hope that she would one day "fall into a Wonderland" and escape the fate of her mother, who is in a mental institution.
- Go Ask Alice—natch.
- "Never Seen By Waking Eyes" and "The Vision of a Vanished Good" by Stephen Dedman feature an eight-year-old girl named Alice who's been eight years old long enough to have known Lewis Carroll personally.
- In Jane Of Lantern Hill by L. M. Montgomery, Jane explicitly tried sitting before mirrors in hopes she could emulate Alice. She finally stopped when accused of doing it for vanity.
- Alisa Seleznyova of the Alice, Girl from the Future stories by Kir Bulychev is a girl of about ten who has all sorts of adventures, meeting strange space creatures and falling through time.
- One of the secondary characters in Night Watch and Day Watch is a witch named Alisa Donnikova. In a story told from her viewpoint, she briefly compares herself to her namesake from Lewis Carroll's story.
- Near the end of Mark Dunn's Under the Harrow, a girl named Alice is saved from dying in a massacre by falling down a dark hole.
- In Snyper, Phil criticizes Persephone's "Queen of Hearts" treatment of his blonde secretary Ashley, leading to a greater discussion and a suggestion that the girl dress as Alice for Halloween. Ash doesn't get the reference, thinking she means Resident Evil.
Live-Action TV
- Alice DeRaey, the protagonist on the appropriately-titled This Is Wonderland, which also started its opening credits with Lewis Carroll's poem "You Are Old, Father William". Other characters included a Stepford Smiler with a heart-motif coffeecup, a perpetually grinning and capricious judge, a man who loses track of time and runs away, a tea-drinking man who wears a big hat sometimes, and a scruffy, over-excitable March Hare type. A few of these connections may be Fan Wank, however. Unlike most Alices, she was a Deadpan Snarker who swore under her breath.
- In Heroes, Angela Petrelli's sister is named Alice. Her favorite book was Alice in Wonderland.
- Alice shows up on Warehouse 13 after she gets out of the mirror, but she's Ax Crazy. Bonus points awarded for using the Jefferson Airplane song in the soundtrack of the episode.
- An episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation features three college students doing research into the afterlife involving heavy use of paralytics, hallucinogenics, and sensory deprivation. The sole female student and the only one to make it out alive was named Alice. Especially jarring given she was Japanese.
- CSI: Crime Scene Investigation did this more explicitly with an episode called "Malice in Wonderland," in which an Alice in Wonderland-themed wedding ended up with the groom dying when the force from a blank round propelled the button on his Mad Hatter hat into his brain.
- CSI NY used the title "Down The Rabbit Hole" in its Second Life-themed episode, making a 'Second Life/Wonderland' comparison.
- One of episode of Raines has a victim named Alice. The connection to Wonderland shapes some of Raines' hallucinations of her.
- LOST is filled with literary allusions in general, and is especially fond of stories where someone is magically transported to another place. This goes for The Wizard of Oz, The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Alice books. For example, Christian Shepherd is compared to the White Rabbit in a first season episode of the same name. In the sixth season, sideways-Jack finds his old house's keys under a White Rabbit statue.
- On Leverage, Parker often uses the alias Alice White.
- In The X-Files episode "Paper Hearts", Agent Mulder has to face again a convicted child molester and Serial Killer who was caught thanks to Mulder's psychological profile. He cut cloth hearts from his victims' clothes and kept them hidden in a copy of Alice in Wonderland. The phrase 'Mad Hat' appeared in Mulder's dreams and also as a mark near a newly found crime scene. The murderer used to live in Alice Road in Boston, and Mulder concludes that that's how he got the idea and that he took the role of the Hatter. There was a shot with the hearts and the little girls' names attached to them, but none of them was named Alice, yet one victim was not identified...
- Murdoch Mysteries: The season 4 finale called "Murdoch in Wonderland" abounds with references and allusions to Alice in Wonderland. The characters go to a costume party to honour the late Lewis Carroll. Detective Murdoch is dressed as the Mad Hatter and Dr. Julia Ogden is Alice. They play croquet, drink "potion" from flasks and write together a non-sense mirror-flipped poem. Murdoch gets drugged and has disturbing visions of falling down the hole or being too big to enter a door. A piece of beauty, this episode.
Music
New Media
Tabletop Games
- In SLA Industries, there is a drug named Alice that causes severe hallucinations that replace the user's normal senses so well that he thinks the hallucinations are the real world.
- JAGS Wonderland is all about the chaotic, infectious, hungry mess that Wonderland really is.
Theater
- In Cirque du Soleil's Mystere, Alice is the unofficial name of the toy snail and lovey that the baby girl loses at the beginning of the story, which results in a journey through a Magical Land to find it.
Video Games
Web Original
- Alice Jones, the shy, introverted (and later in the game, decidedly creepy) Survival of the Fittest version 3 character.
- Anti-Villain of The Descendants, Vorpal, has an Alice in Wonderland motif. On top of her name, her friend Mr. Voice calls her Alice because he either doesn't know her real name, or is avoiding saying it. Her Start of Darkness comes at the hands of an Operation called Jabberwock.
- Alice from Living with Insanity.
- Alice Creek in Dark Mirror LLC.
- Alice of Alice And Kev.
- Alice from ''Namesake.
- In the Josie stories of the Whateley Universe, the Deuteragonist is Ecila Mason. The beginning is very clearly the start of Alice in Wonderland with Ecila as Alice. By the time Josie starts her story, Ecila has been away from Earth for so long that she has lost most connections with humanity.
Western Animation
- Alice May from Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.
- Elisa Masa from Gargoyles. Lampshaded in the pilot, when she, chased by mercenaries, runs into Alice in Wonderland-themed cafe.
- Quite subtle, but do you think Odd Della Robbia's Lyoko form is a "giant purple *
Cheshire cat" just because?
- In the Samurai Jack episode "Jack is Naked" there are more than a few Wonderland references.
- Prisoner 775 from Ben 10: Ultimate Alien is clearly a reference to the Cheshire Cat. It has the exact same pattern as seen in the Disney version, and is a chameleon that can blend perfectly with it's surroundings, except for its teeth. At one point, the teeth are all that you see of it.
- Young Justice has given us some thanks to Artemis's backstory: her sister took her codename from the Cheshire Cat and Artemis herself has long blond hair.
- The tie-in comics drive it home: Artemis catches sight of Superboy in the middle of a fight, and directly calls him her "white rabbit" when she follows him. The two issues presenting the story of how she came to the League's notice are titled "Down the Rabbit Hole!" and "Wonderland." She also has a poster of Alice and the Cheshire Cat hanging on the wall in her bedroom.
- Avatar The Last Airbender episode "The Swamp"
Aang: I heard laughing and I saw some girl in a fancy dress.
Sokka: Well, there must be a tea party here and we just didn't get our invitations!
- Alice the male-to-female transsexual guard from Super Jail may not seem a reference, but consider that in the pilot episode the recurring thug Jacknife steals a white rabbit, ingests something like the "drink me" potions that alters his perceptions, plus there are two naughty twins and Superjail looks like a deranged, twisted Wonderland.
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