Al is In Wonderland: Ever After High Alistair Wonderland by Mattel

Lewis Carroll's Alice is an icon, and her having a son in the Ever After High-verse was intriguing. But while there were things I liked...I just didn't see much of the famous character translated over. Still, I like boy dolls and I was motivated to make a masc-Alice restyle of my own. I thought I could do better service to the origin character with the right pieces. 

Read my first post exploring Ever After High, which also covers my thoughts on how it tackles the Alice stories, here.

Alistair Wonderland is the son of Alice (no given surname, though she was based on the real girl Alice Liddell), and aligns with the Royal faction, meaning he wants to follow in his mother's footsteps. 

Colorized John Tenniel illustration of Alice and the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Tenniel illustration of Alice and the Red Queen chess piece in Through the Looking-Glass. Alice's iconography of a black headband and striped tights actually originated from Tenniel's changes to her look in this book, and were not present in the first one.

EAH portrait of Alistair.

Al is one of the Wonderlandians (likely not a native, though) who didn't escape Wonderland after its corruption by the Evil Queen in EAH lore, so he only gets out and joins Ever After High through the events of the Spring Unsprung special. Al is a bit different from his mom in that he prides himself on being an ace riddle-solver, seeming to be more gung-ho about navigating the surreal land than his mom was, and more capable of deciphering its nonsense. He also seems to have slight notes of the Victorian adventurer archetype as such. Given that Alistair would be going into his story much older than his mom (who would likely have been seven like the Alice of the books), he naturally has some big differences even if he follows through with her story. Perhaps things like him being a male child and his story necessarily being very different through his age is another facet of the "repeating the story is a fool's errand" thesis the plot seems to land on, because it's very hard to see Al successfully fulfilling the original story, especially not if his approach is actively different to his mom's. Like Lizzie Hearts, he seems to want to follow the letter of the story, but not the spirit, making his Royal status less rigid and less rooted in traditionalism than other Royals.

Alistair is a very difficult doll to get a hold of. He only had two editions, and while picking between them doesn't matter much for a restyle, I still favored the original as far as a base for restyling. Al is brutal on the aftermarket and his prices have risen every time I've checked, and I'm just a little like...damn, really? He's not even that good...

I jumped in and went for it this August when I realized I had a good buffer in my budget and woke up to the fact that there was just no chance of a better deal on Alistair in the future. My copy of Al is complete as a doll, but unboxed and does not have his bookmark "diary" or brush (if he had one initially).

Alistair has the golden stand color used for the Royals faction of students, and a wider waist clip for his body sculpt.

His hair is expectedly blond per the iconic look of Alice (though Carroll initially illustrated her as brunette with implicitly brown hair before John Tenniel's illustrations in the published edition cemented the icon). In the cartoon and 2D art, Al's hair looks a little paler and has more wavy shape to it. The doll's is side-parted and entirely gelled down. 

There's no direct style similarity to Alice's hair, likely because of the gender difference. I think of Alice with a pulled-back hairline, and I think Al could have done the same, though. That would match up well.

Alistair's face is classically handsome in a more pointed, elfin way, and his expression is confident, suiting his written personality as an invested explorer. Like the girls, though, the face can feel too blank and unrealistic. It feels like Alistair doesn't have a plausible amount of forehead space to me. He needs a little more. His lips look very pink for a nude tone. It's a little too bubble-gum.

Over the costume, Alistair has a drinking flask on a strap which includes some nice details including a buckle and a compass. It makes him look more tactical and savvy to Wonderland, and surely, the flask contains some kind of size-altering draught inside like the kind of potables and edibles Alice encountered.

The flask is able to turn between the strap ends, which attach with pins and holes, and the flask strap disconnects on the peg with the compass to let the strap easily be taken off or put back on for easy removal and replacement of the accessory. 

Al's outfit is depicts a rolled-up open jacket over a cream tank top. The jacket has lapels and is stitched with metallic gold thread, but has no simulated buttons. The sleeves are made to look tidily rolled up. The pattern on the jacket is nice, with a dark blue background, filigree pattern, and light blue and white overlaid symbols of clock spirals, teapots, bottles and card suits. I'm reminded slightly of cyanotype photo prints.

Blue is the color iconically associated with Alice, but it's typically a lighter shade than this. Alice's pinafore dress has been colored yellow in early editions, but light blue eventually became the standard, especially after Disney's animated 1951 adaptation of the first book. I think Alistair misses the mark by darkening the blue. Would it really kill his masculinity to look more evocative of his mom? Boys were not collecting Ever After High, so why did the dudes in the franchise feel so unimaginative?

While the layer under the jacket looks like a tank...

...devastatingly to me, this is just one piece faking a two-layered arrangement. 

The shirt is one panel stitched into the jacket front and the whole piece opens from the back like a lot of doll tops. This feels unforgivably cheap to me; why can't this be a layered costume?

Alistair's pants are fairly basic khaki-colored long pants with no special detailing. There aren't any pockets, not even suggested through stitching.

On his feet, Alistair has what might be the tallest pair of boots I've seen on a boy doll--it's really really rare for this length to be on a guy. These look like hardy leather pieces with buckle straps, but also have Victorian-style stud buttons up the sides.

These pieces may have a very subtle color wash to look more detailed, leathery, and antique, but it's not obvious and these could just be a basic solid cast.

Overall, nothing about Al's costume feels like a sufficient masculinization of Alice's iconic look to me. I might not be able to guess which fantasy character was his parent if I was looking at him for the first time without an up-close view. The blue is too dark, there are no stripes or black bows, and the outfit only barely feels Victorian through the boots. I found Max Wonder to feel much more evocative of the character, despite his more modern gender-nonconforming take on the Alice concept. 

The Ever After High boy body is significantly beefier and a bit taller than the G1 MH boy body, and...

Left to right: MH G1, EAH, MH G2 with G1 head, MH G3.

...oh.

...well. Dang. I have shown you this body sculpt on the blog already. The Skullector Frankenstein's Monster did use it after all. 

An easy clothes swap.

I was so sure when writing about the Monster and checking photos of the EAH sculpt then that it couldn't be what the Monster used, but I was absolutely incorrect and I had to be seeing a discrepancy that wasn't actually there. I've amended the information there now with this picture as proof. The Monster's body is clearly a re-mold and it has a 2022 stamp to prove it, but the sculpt is a match, hands and bolts aside. I'm surprised they decided to source EAH, clearly a dead franchise with no apparent prospects of revival, for the Monster's sake...but that's what they did.

I do like the EAH boy body, and its stereotypical male ideal does work when most of the boys are supposed to be fairy-tale love interests. It's a shame there were so very few male characters in the line. While it's true that skintone diversity overall in the mostly human-colored EAH was overall pretty poor and Blackness was minimally depicted, the boys had even less diversity than the girls by virtue of how few there were in number and editions. I always admired how (comparatively) large the male cast of Monster High dolls was among girls' franchises. EAH had a few more male characters in the story, but literally only four of the guys (Hunter, Dexter, Daring, Alistair) got dolls, with a franchise total of just seven unique boy doll releases counting their multiple editions--and Daring never got a properly high-quality pre-reboot doll. 

The main thing I needed to test was whether Ken clothes fit on Al, since that was the most likely and useful source of boy doll clothes I could peruse when ordering things to redress him in. I knew they wouldn't be too small, but I needed to know if they would be detrimentally overlarge. Ken clothes were too big for Monster High G2's new boy sculpt, but EAH is more filled-out. I also figured slightly big clothes could work for Al in a way. I see the Alice stories as a running commentary on the unfair standards children are expected to live up to when interacting with adults, so Al could make a lot of sense reframed as a portrait of awkward, confusing teen years!

Ken clothes do feel a tiny bit large on Al, but again, it's in a way I think will feel appropriate.

Al doesn't know how he feels about Beach.

The EAH boy body being so tall creates a very stark difference with the Wonderlandian girls, who are all on a shorter-legged body sculpt that might be an emulation of Tenniel's big-head political cartoon-style caricatures in the classic illustrations. Al is a full head (and maybe more) taller than Lizzie Hearts!

So the three goals to balance with a restyle of Al were:

• Find a way to retain his Victorian-adventurer side the character was designed with

• Make his appearance scan a lot more closely as a masculine adaptation of the classic Alice look

• Introduce an awkward-teenager element to bring in the thematic notes I see in Alice commenting on the difficulties of being a child in a world of adults.

That started with a repaint. My instincts were to add some spots on his face and a wispy mustache to look like an awkward teenager trying to grow into himself while emulating a Victorian-gentleman look. I also loosened his hair more in the wave shape of the 2D Al, and made his lips less pink while painting white in between for a slight grin. 

This works for a teen gentleman adventurer, and just the hair and lip changes match the 2D Al better, but this is way too confident and pretty despite my efforts to make him look awkward. This looks like a condescending, snide, snobby teenage "intellectual" who could be the kind of person who would have tormented his mom during her Wonderland adventures. I don't want Al to be a jerk. To fix this, I wiped off most of his right eyebrow and repainted it in a shyer upturn, and repainted his mustache attempt in thinner, lighter colors so the character's true youth shows through and the facial hair looks less confident and developed. I also re-slicked his hair, pulling it backward more Alice-style, and I think this shows a teenage boy who's trying to be more mature, but is still a mix of curious and open while also being gentle and very confused. 

Both of these face revisions look like entirely different people from each other and the original paint!

I ordered a powder-blue Ken suit off Etsy for him, made by DianasWhatKnotShop. It came with a jacket (closed in front with metal snaps), trousers (closed in back with velcro) and a necktie (on an elastic fabric loop).

To roughly complete the costume in lieu of a dress shirt (which I still need to find for him), I put the striped vest from L.O.L. O.M.G. Tough Dude on, taking it from my restyled Jackson Jekyll concept. The rough lines aren't quite on and the broken-heart symbol only halfway works as a reference to the iconic card suit, but I'm using this vest in lieu of literally any other option. No other compatible doll vest appears to exist in this template!

The jacket is huge on him, and very awkward. Thus, it is absolutely perfect. Not only does it suit a teenager struggling to assume the role of a man when he's maybe not ready, and that suits the tones in Alice of adult pressures on children, but it also works perfectly for a character who changes size a lot, as if his outfit has shifted too many times and he's not in sync after so many twists and turns. That feels like a teenage allegory too--your size changing and you feeling uncoordinated, nothing fitting right for very long...This could have been a really clever, insightful character concept, is what I'm saying. So I'm taking him there myself.

I'm not sold on the brown colors of the boots and satchel now, since the Alice aesthetic favors black, white and blue only, so I might try dyeing the pieces. I wondered if the boots didn't suit the outfit anymore, but I think they have their place for his adventurer concept. He could work high socks and short shoes and short pants, but that could look a little too dandyish and impractical for someone who wants to adventure and sort out the madness.

I ordered a pack of unbranded Ken-size dress clothes that looked to be a random assortment with a guaranteed range of items, including a suit outfit that could give Al a dress shirt with a black bowtie already included, and maybe some other shirts that would suit him.

The assortment I got was mostly tacky summery clothing, so the only thing Al could really wear is the dress shirt. It has full-length sleeves and is white satiny fabric that's more translucent than it ought to be. I am pleased that it's a separate piece, though. I'd expected it to be sewn to the pants and that I'd have to cut them apart.

I wonder if I could design a Living Dead Doll who would suit a pineapple shirt, just to use one of them? I dunno. Maybe Beach Ken will get another outfit. I'd love to get one of his dolls with the new grinning Ryan Gosling sculpt.

The dress shirt fits okay on Al. It's a little large and the collar is big on Al, but the striped vest helped to keep it tightened and pulled down properly, and the jacket layers over it well. I did add a small vertical fold (held by glue) at the back of the jacket so it would be a little tighter in back. 

Here's the outfit put together now.

I then put the satchel and boots in to be dyed black, which worked very well. 

Here's Alistair's outfit without the jacket. This does work, and the high-waisted fit of the Ken pants on Al does feel authentically old-timey, but I prefer the full outfit.

I keep the pants bunched up above the boot because the legs are too wide to stuff neatly inside the boots. If I pull the legs down into the boots, either the boots widen too much, or a fold of the pants sticks out of the slit in the back. I think it works with the ill-fitting awkward resonance of the outfit to have it this way.

To stage him falling down the rabbit hole, I hung him by the calf with some fishing line, suspending him between the corners of a bookshelf, and holding a Shadow High book in his hand. Here's the pictures I kept from that shoot.

Here's Al in the famous hall with the size-changing conundrum puzzle. 

There's a small door leading to the Queen of Hearts' rose garden, and a table with a key and a bottle of size-shrinking drink in it. In the book, Alice sees through the door and wants to go through, then discovers the bottle shrinks her. When she shrinks, she realizes she's closed the door again and left the key on top of the table, which she's too small for. She then finds a cake under the table that grows her too large, and she cries so much that when she reaches the right size again to enter the door, she's swept away by her own tears, thus preventing her from reaching the "end" right away. 

Al regards the bottle (from LEGO's Disney Minifigures Series 1 Alice).

Eager as he was to do better in this scenario, and cautious of the mistakes that could befall him, Al still made some missteps and did find himself growing too much at one point.

Correcting this, he decided to dose very carefully on the next shrink. It was a bit under the right amount, but he called it good enough.

The garden was beautiful, but he was starting to have second thoughts. He wasn't really playing the story correctly, was he? If he wanted to be a Royal, perhaps he had better go a more roundabout way.

Here's Al meeting with the Caterpillar. This is a Jellycat plush I had to have expressly for its Alice connotations. I'm sure it's blue for that very reason. 

This was fair game in the EAH lore, too--the Caterpillar isn't one of the Wonderland characters with an Ever After High child, so I'm not treading over canon and replacing a character here. I couldn't take a photo of Al with a plush cat and call that the Cheshire Cat, because his Cheshire Cat is the humanoid girl Kitty Cheshire.

In the interim since my discussion of EAH and my Lizzies the first time, I'd gotten ahold of some decorative flamingo pieces, which were the perfect size for the Princess of Hearts and the lost young adventurer to croquet with. We have real rose bushes out front which I was glad to take advantage of.

To take these photos, Lizzie is actually leaning on Alistair to stand up. He was fortunately stable enough to support her and allow me to use no doll stands!

And here he is being subjected to one of Lizzie's famous "off with your head"s!

I personally think an Alistair/Lizzie couple would have been more interesting than the canonical Alistair/Bunny one. But I'm also biased against the EAH animal characters for only wearing ears on headbands and not being animal humanoids in any way. Next to Monster High's werebeasts, it looks pathetic and doesn't do justice to the surrealism of Alice.

And as ever, the joy of a toy Alice character is the scale always being plausibly "correct" due to size-shifting shenanigans, so I put Al on the bookshelf with other iconic items from the story.

As should be clear from my post history, I adore Alice in Wonderland and am somewhat protective or snobbish regarding interpretations and adaptations that fail to capture the spirit or ethos I see and treasure in Carroll's stories. Alistair Wonderland is one such doll, having none of the clever design features or tonal authenticity that Ever After High's other shaky entries into Wonderland still managed to achieve. Signature Lizzie is one of the best dolls in the whole brand, and there's an argument for Al being one of the worst. As his own doll, he's really not all that exciting. He looks like a vaguely fanciful generic attractive dude with droplets of Victoriana about him. And as an homage to Alice herself...I don't get it. The look doesn't capture most of the iconic markers of the character, and while I like and respect the flip of Al being invested in solving Wonderland as an adventurer, his character otherwise doesn't carry any of the tones I found in the book where Alice is incredibly put-upon by virtue of being a child in a nonsense land of demanding adults. 

I think my restyle fixed all of those issues--my Al looks like Alice immediately, and his concept is based on teenage awkwardness and a desire to assert grown-up roles in a way that resonates with the original work and in a way that shows the original work could be succcessfully reframed to discuss teen struggles. 

I don't think the Mattel designers really understood Alice beyond aesthetics (and even then, not all of the time), and that always makes me sad because I think it's a wonderful piece of fantasy which stands by childhood and its importance. Alice isn't actually nonsense. It just talks about the nonsense in adults.

Alistair is a dull doll as made. But as I remade him, he's absolutely endearing and characterful. Shy, confused, yet daring and eager to grow up ahead of time...I think he makes a wonderful successor in his mother's famous story.

Sorry for making his market prices even worse, though!