Disney, do we need to talk?
One odd little doll line in the 2010s was the Disney Attractionistas: fashion dolls featuring rather Monster High-esque fantasy personifications of...famous rides at the Disney parks. I always wanted to like them more than I did, and never got any because I didn't. I didn't love the rendering of the faces, at least not as 3D doll heads, and the proportions and low articulation disappointed me. I felt the worst about not liking Gracey, the Haunted Mansion girl. I did like the spooky greyscale-body, color-clothes bellhop Holly from the Hollywood Tower of Terror. And then there's...Maddie the pink and blue-green Hatter girl based on the Mad Tea Party ride, with a teacup hat and polka dots and okay come on what are we doing here?
This is blatant, right? Could this be parallel thinking and coming from the ride and names for the character guiding the Attractionista toward similarity? Unfortunately, I'm inclined to say it probably is. The dolls released the same year, suggesting they were almost certainly independently in development at around the same time, so it might be impossible for Madeline Hatter to have influenced Attractionistas Maddie. It's also not impossible Maddie's design was an extrapolation of the ride's aesthetic with no other visual influences.
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| The Mad Tea Party ride. (Image source link.) |
I do kinda feel like Maddie doesn't feel enough like the picture here to totally shirk accusations of copying Madeline, but again, did she have the opportunity to commit such a crime?
Could Disney have take care to further differentiate this doll from existing character designs on the market? Absolutely, if their Maddie was designed at any point after EAH's was publicly known. She was released the second of the two Hatter girls, thus why people were able to look at her and say "Hmmm...". In such a case where Disney could have prevented the similarity, their Maddie could have been less suspect and if Disney had knowledge of the EAH design before designing their doll, then the result is a little scummy. She's in a grey area of not being a direct, obvious lift in any manner, but there's also so much that could have been less similar. I don't know if there was any significant Mattel/Disney personnel crossover at the time in some way where Madeline Hatter's design was shared or leaked to a Disney designer under the table in such a way where she could have been imitated by the Attractionista before the public got to know the EAH character. I don't want to get into conspiratorial thinking like that.
Perhaps the most damning argument against Maddie is that her official character art looks markedly less similar to Madeline.
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| Gracey's art is more appealing than the doll, too. |
There's more color and pattern in this concept design, with the hair especially, and the art enters total deniability for me. This Maddie would be easily excusable as coincidentally similar to Madeline. The doll, however...did they change things to make her more similar? Kinda feels that way. Or at least, the design simplifications made to the final doll are changes that make the two Maddies look oddly alike. The concept design could have been more faithfully produced, or even making half of the hair blonde or orange would have created distance from Madeline and more specific affinity to the Disney ride even if the concept design needed simplifying.
(I love how the Maddie art looks dizzy as if she's been on the ride! Translating that somehow into the doll could have really lifted her.)
I'm not inclined to give Disney the benefit of the doubt for basically anything. I have absolutely zero reason to offer grace to the most litigious IP-monopolistic company in the world. Especially when given the context. Mattel made EAH after losing the Disney doll license, and Disney had to have been salty about Mattel still trying to use fairy-tale concepts because they want absolute cultural ownership of the genre and for their versions to be the foremost in everyone's minds. I'll always be fully on the side of anybody who wants to use public-domain stories and take non-Disney interpretations of fairy tales mainstream. Disney seemed to respond to EAH at least a little bit with competing doll/narrative franchise Descendants, another school-AU about the kids of fairy tales led by an evil sorceress's daughter who wants to be good. Even if it was independently conceived, I don't believe Disney did anything to avoid direct competition in the final execution. Descendants' dolls were also licensed to and produced by Hasbro, Mattel's competitor who had the Disney deal at the time. So it's easy to look at the doll world of the time and assume Attractionistas Maddie is another potential potshot. And yet, the timeline doesn't paint a clear narrative that Maddie is a ripoff. It genuinely seems plausible that the dolls are coincidental...which is less fun to discuss.
I do actually like Maddie more than some other Attractionistas, though!
Maddie here is a bit of an edge case for the criteria of this review series, as she's technically based on a licensed property, but also stands as an original character. She represents the Mad Tea Party spinning teacups ride in the parks, itself derived from the 1951 Alice in Wonderland, but she's not an adaptation of the Hatter's character design from that Disney film, and is based on the ride itself...and in the worst-case scenario, Mattel's Madeline Hatter. As such, reviewing Maddie is not reviewing a doll's translation of a preexisting character design, not in the way a doll of the Johnny Depp or Ed Wynn Hatters, or the Tommy doll in cosplay as the Ed Wynn Hatter, would be. Attractionistas Maddie is firmly a doll-original character...even if how original she is remains up for debate.
It's useful that the Ever After High character has the full name "Madeline", so in this review, as 've already done, I'll be referring to that EAH character more formally. In this post, "Maddie" is the Attractionista (whether I like it or not) and "Madeline" is the Ever After High doll.
Despite Maddie being a less complex doll than Madeline, acquiring her complete was not much cheaper in 2026. I made Madeline more expensive for myself by assembling her out of two copies (something which was both necessary and, ultimately, beneficial in my misadventures with that doll), but an individual complete Madeline was only a bit more pricey than a complete Maddie. It wasn't strictly necessary for me to get Maddie in-box, but a boxed copy was the cheapest complete option, as the next cheapest had lost her little black slippers, which seemed commonly absent. The boxed copy also gave me the best shot with her hair, as it was in factory style and looked tidier than the next option down the price scale.
At last, Maddie arrived.
I wasn't satisfied with this tea setting, but it was a "screw it" kind of necessity--I needed to use this house corner to have a backdrop large enough for the doll's box, so other visions weren't working for the review scenario. Since the doll needed work anyway, I decided to restage later with a second tea setting with a better, more personalized vibe for cover-photo purposes, but this is what I was working with here. (I also have a Disney-Alice teacup I forgot to bring down for this shoot, so all the more reason to reshoot with a tidy doll.) In suspicious imitation of Madeline's setting, I used a garden pot display table, but a smaller size than Madeline's, and built a staircase to reach it rather than using a ladder. I baked some scones until I got one reasonably Mickey-shaped and got some Mickey Goldfish crackers as well as Chessmen cookies and frosted soft sugar cookies.
The Attractionistas boxes are categorically larger than they need to be, perhaps in an attempt to lend them more collectible stature than a simple playline doll.
The doll herself is basically Barbie-size with a Bratz-sized head, and the top and bottom of the doll are each inches from the top and bottom of the box. All of the Attractionistas have the same basic box design framing them in a Gothic brick arch, likely to evoke Disney park architecture and the castle idea, as a castle based on one of their movies is the icon of each main Disney park. Maddie's name and a jewelry charm based on her are featured on the front, and the side of the box features a string of charms, with only Maddie's on top filled in with her teacup symbol.
In total, there were eight Attractionistas--Maddie (Mad Tea Party), Celeste (Space Mountain), Gracey (The Haunted Mansion), Pearl (Pirates of the Caribbean), Carrie (Fantasyland Carousel), Nellie (The Jungle Cruise,) Holly (Hollywood Tower of Terror), and Briar (the now-defunct Splash Mountain). Holly and Briar were a smaller "wave 2", so the Maddie box accounts for the first six Attractionistas within these charms. Each Attractionista's box moves her colored charm to the top of the column and fills it in. Gracey's charm is the light purple, Pearl's is the orange, Nellie's is the red, Carrie's is the royal blue, and Celeste's is the indigo. Holly's charm symbol was another red, while Briar's was green.
The other thin side of the box is just the doll line logo.
The back of the box has Maddie's inaccurate concept art and a bio with poor contrast against the background.
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| Toy companies shouldn't be allowed to display preliminary art or photos on boxes if the toy design doesn't match. |
First is text about who the Attractionistas are, and it's a bit propagandistic and repugnant:
There's magic in the world if you know where to find it.
Do you believe that's true? So do these special friends. They found magic and much more at their favorite places on earth: Disney Theme Parks. You see, these amazing girls love to be together at the Disney Parks every chance they get. They cherish being able to share all the fun, from the awesome food and cool parades to the cute characters and fantastic fireworks.
Now, even though each girl shares a passion for Disney Parks with her friends, each is definitely her own person! Each has her own special interests, personality, and outlook on life. Most of all, each has chosen their own special Disney Theme Park attraction as their "perfect fit". One in particular that seems made for who they are as individuals, and where they feel right at home.
Something magical happened to these best friends after a tremendous day of Disney Theme Park fun. They settled into their favorite place to watch the fireworks, but on this night, a bright, shining star shone high above them: The Wishing Star. Together they wished, deep in their hearts. They wished they would always be friends. They wished to always connect somehow with these beloved places. And they wished that they could be part of their favorite attractions, and that it could be part of them.
All of this wondrous wishing came true. But that's just the beginning of the story. What happens next? That's up to them, and you?
Now, I'm not going to pretend I don't understand how a Disney ride could be something you could feel an intense interest and identification with. I'm in the process of completely Mansioning out for an upcoming doll review series; I 100% relate to Gracey (and will in fact be reviewing her soon!). But connecting deeply to all of these rides? Forgive my snobbery, but I don't think every Disney ride is banking on the same kind of creative depth as the Mansion. Peal and Pirates make a good case for that kind of fandom, alongside Gracey. But who's staking so much of their identity on the spinning teacups that they'd wish to embody that ride forever? Does Nellie so badly love a slow boring cruise (with cheap animal animatronics and only corny self-deprecating jokes holding up the appeal) that she had to brand herself that way forever? And it feels so insidious. Disney Parks are mentioned so many times that the only thing the copy is missing is a trademark symbol after each instance for perfect unwitting self-satire, and the message of "don't you want to be a Disney Parks devotee for the rest of your life; isn't it a fun magical prospect to tie yourself forever to the Mouse?" is hard not to extract from this. Personifications of the Disney rides could have a better origin story than a cheap YA-fantasy "chosen for a magical world" narrative that looks like it's actually about selling your soul to the Mouse. It feels especially disgusting as the gap between "people who can actually go to Disney when they want" and "the average citizen" has grown wider and wider over the decades.
Reading this bio makes me feel more justified in being mean to Disney in this review. They won't care, anyhow. One thing I do like about the bio is that it explains the doll names. None of these girls are from the fiction their rides represent, so giving them plausible human names which tie into the rides they come to embody is clever. Gracey could have been named "Shirley McCobb" or "Belfrida Batterson" or some other spooky punny name if she was a Mansion character herself, but she's not. She's just a girl who had an identification with the ride, so "Gracey" makes sense as a reference to the ride while being a name that a real everyday girl could have. (Why is it a reference? I'll explain later.)
These dolls overall have a tween/teen appeal with the whole "chosen for a personality-based escapist fantasy alignment" narrative and the feeling of the characters approaching OC fandom gijinka designs made by earnest teenagers. Gracey, for example, is a fandom interpretation of The Haunted Mansion more than looking like an actual character who would be depicted in the ride itself.
Maddie has an individual bio at the bottom.
When London-born Maddie first set foot on U.S. soil with her white rabbit "Sugar", she was delighted to find America just as whirly-twirly as it is across the pond. She loves to spin around and say silly rhymes, so she's right at home on the Mad Tea Party! attraction. At 4 p.m., of course, her spinning stops for a proper spot of tea, scones, and finger sandwiches. But any other time, look for a blur of pastel hair circling the Mad Hatter's teapot--it's Maddie, having another right jolly romp!
I'll give Maddie a point over Madeline--this doll's bio acknowledges that a Mad Hatter character should logically be English. Madeline isn't portrayed as such.
Maddie, while complete in box, did not seem to have aged well from first glimpse. Her box window was yellowed, her hat was falling around inside the box unsecured, her packaging elastics looked aged and yellowed, and there was a stain on her collar.
Here's the backdrop slid out, laying bare how needlessly large the box is.
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| You could fit an Alice doll in there too, easily! |
The doll had plastic tags pinning her head down, but they're the kind that are easier to grab and pull, and she was tagged into the cardboard, not a plastic shell. Her hair was sewn in with matching thread to cut, while her ankles had a plastic tag around them and her waist was held with a twist-tie that went around the torso inside her costume. The wire was wrapped around her waist before her dress was put on!
Here she is out and assembled, put into an unbranded doll stand.
The Attractionistas not having doll stands of their own is inexcusable; they cannot stand unaided and they have more than enough real estate in their packages to include them.
Maddie starts with her hat, which is pretty spectacular...and incomprehensibly heavy. The hat is styled as a stack of teacups with a saucer "brim" and the molding and painting is pretty phenomenal...but it's all solid dense plastic and has zero business weighing so much. It's heavier than the whole doll without the hat; it more than doubles her weight when she wears it!!!
The hat has an elastic cord chinstrap, but that does nothing to stop it from sliding forward or back. and falling off her dome because the hat is just too heavy.
The top cup is depicted to be empty rather than full of tea--probably a good thing, because plastic filling the cup would only increase its weight. The saucer brim is contoured with an internal indent to fit her head a bit better so it's not just a flat surface underneath.
The cord snakes around the cups on one side, which is best designated the back side.
Like Madeline's hats, there is no reference to the price label drawn on the original visual depiction of the Hatter by John Tenniel.
If it were purely an aesthetic competition, I think this hat would win over Madeline's. It takes the same idea of teaware mimicking a hat but goes big with it in the way Madeline's costumes always seemed afraid to. A big spectacular hat ought to be the anchor of any Hatter's costume.
Maddie's hair is fewer colors than she was illustrated with, which is one of the problems that makes her look like Madeline.
The hair is bad enough that rerooting her could be a beneficial project, allowing the addition of her intended hair colors which would also set her apart more visually, while upgrading the hair quality, because this looks like it's probably fried polypropylene. The front center-parted locks are azure, while the hair behind is divided into a mint half and a purple half; the mint being like G3 Twyla's color. The azure front locks were gelled solid. It's hard to assign a particular character to this hair's shaping because the fiber is poor enough that the best-case scenario of the hair silhouette may never have even been achieved. It's shortish and wavyish.
The Attractionistas faces have an awkward quality on several dolls as if the paint and sculpt aren't harmonizing well or like the cartoon-to-3D style hadn't fully succeeded. Maddie was actually the first doll to lack this awkwardness in my mind, which surprised me and made me keener to invite her into Hatter Madness. I think her face sculpt and paint look great.
Maddie has a slightly off-human pink skintone, and her eyes are her largest feature, though her nose and mouth don't feel undersized. She has a cheeky close-lipped smile and her lower lids are curved up to put the smile in the eyes as well. The eye region of the mold is flat and uncontoured with no defined eyeball and lids in the molding. Her eyes are pink and she has simple, crisp face paint with a couple of upper lashes, pink lid lines, and eyebrows which match her front hair (thank goodness; fantasy dolls with eyebrows that don't match their fantasy hair really bother me!)
The yellow gunk in the corner of her eye scrubbed away, as did some yellow on her hairline, but some of the doll's plastic has yellowed for real, especially on her neck. Great thing summer is the ideal time for some peroxide retrobright treatments!
Maddie has a nice profile with a long nose.
Maddie has symmetrical earrings shaped like cupcakes. These didn't budge at first and I wondered if they were fixed in, but when one began spinning, I realized these were just like Monster High earrings and they pull out on thin pins. The head isn't very squishy vinyl and the earring fit is tight, so MH earrings are easier to use.
Maddie has a cord necklace with a plastic charm shaped like a teacup viewed from a slight top angle. The side of the charm is sliced to rest flat against Maddie's collar.
The trouble with necklaces like these is keeping the knot from swiveling to the front, but a dot of glue on the back of the neck can solve that. This necklace isn't designed to be removed anyway.
Maddie's collar is white satin with black lace trim, and has a nasty yellowed spot begging for vinegar. It's not necessarily unrealistic; it looks like Maddie sloshed and spilled her tea, but it is most unbecoming and absolutely not part of the design.
Maddie's bodice is vertically divided like her hair, but into lavender and reddish pink tones. The puffed sleeves are the opposite colors from their sides of the torsos and are trimmed with black lace.
Maddie's skirt has a waist apron made of white satin with black dots, and the waistband is sewn into a rounded bow on the back.
The bow is non-functional and is placed on one side of the costume's velcro seam.
The skirt is five tiers of sheer blue fabric trimmed with black piping, and looks great. While the predominance of satin in Maddie's costume doesn't bother me or feel like the doll is cheaping out in this case, another texture is still very welcome and it works well. The skirt being satin too would have made this a worse dress.
The bottom of the apron is held down to the skirt with a stitch so the apron doesn't flap up. An apron is a good costume choice for a female Hatter, evoking Alice's pinafore and a maid's tea-serving uniform alike. Makes me think Ever After High missed a trick by not doing a "tea shop" line replacing a coffee-shop theme a la G1 Monster High's Coffin Bean, where Madeline could work as a server in an apron like this.
Maddie has semi-sheer white gloves with lace cuffs. They're mitten-shaped, of course, but she pulls it off.
Maddie is my third official Hatter in this series to have spiffy gloves. The Silver Label Hatter and Madeline did as well.
Maddie wears leggings, which are a visual downgrade from the tights in her concept art--in cut and design. Not covering the feet doesn't look very good at all, and the tights are less intricately patterned. I do still like the look of the stripes on just one leg.
Maddie's black slippers appear to be the exact same mold as my Fairytale Designer Collection Snow White's shoes, and thus they're just as prone to falling off. No wonder aftermarket Maddies don't tend to have their shoes. Simply giving the doll boots would have solved both the problems of not being able to give her footies and the shoes being easily lost. Gracey wears boots over leggings--why couldn't Maddie disguise the ankles the same way?
Maddie's body is the Disney Store Barbie-mimic shape--same proportions below the chin as my Fairytale Designer Collection Snow White--but with reduced articulation.
She has rubber legs which prevented me from taking off her leggings (or at least, I refused to once it proved to be a likely nightmare) and the click knees inside are poor. They only click back securely into one position, and the legs bend in weird ways when trying to flex the joint, making me feel like I'm going to snap the armature to the side and break it every time. I've met better click legs which keep the internal joints firmly aligned while bending them, and which click more times on both sides. The shoulder joints are very tight and the arms are a bit flexible, making them bend before the shoulder moves. I assumed the shoulders were swivel joints, and it took me a while to find out they were rotating hinges! The hinges were a welcome discovery that warmed me a bit more to the body design, as they add some animation--enough for this doll at least. The head and hips have good range of motion. It's actually impressive that the head has the friction to never flop around under the weight of the hat. It wouldn't have been surprising if her neck joint was unable to hold a pose while her hat was on, but that's one flaw the hat never created. Kudos, I guess.
If the arms only swiveled or the head flopped around, I'd be itching to pop Maddie onto a better-articulated hard-legged body in a heartbeat, but even then, I don't know if she really has options thanks to her specific pink coloring. Her body is less human-colored than it might look in some photos. Maybe the only option out there beyond repainting a body would be the Madame Alexander SpacePOP fashion doll Hera, but her pink looks like it's probably too pale and flesh-toned, while SpacePOP Juno's color looks too dark and purple. I gather the SpacePOP body is a bit smaller than Barbie-size.
I was excited to discover the Disney Store body and a modern median-range Made to Move Barbie can swap clothes. I thought modern Barbie shifted enough since the 2000s-era sculpts the Disney bodies are based on that clothes swapping was unviable, but a Made to Move doll wears Maddie's clothes easily.
This isn't useful for Maddie's sake as there are no Made to Move bodies in her color, but I'm tucking this away. Gracey is mostly covered by her costume, after all...
Maddie's pet rabbit Sugar is cute enough. I have no issues with him (or is it her?) and don't find the design insulting like most cute-appeal toys these days. I like that the bow is a fabric piece, and it comes off with velcro. Maddie could wear it.
Because I'm not counting the hat, Maddie is my second official Hatter in this series not to have any doll-scale tea accessories. The Storyland Madame Alexander doll I picked didn't either. Madeline's purse is an edge case since it can be argued that it's not a real teapot in context, but I just know she'd use it as both a bag and a real pot, and she can hold it both ways, so I count it.
I put Maddie in a peroxide bath in sunlight to treat her neck discoloration while her dress soaked in vinegar. I tried replacing her hat elastic with a length of cord that would make the hat too tight to shift forward and back off her dome, but that evidently isn't possible. When the hat is hooked around her ears, it still easily slides backward off her head. It's just too damn heavy. I fixed this as best I could by giving up on the chinstrap, drilling into the bottom of the hat, and sticking a nail in Maddie's head that the hat could catch on. Good enough.
A good design could have been a hole bored into Maddie's head and a peg on the hat that plguged into that hole. A better design could have been anything lighter oh my god. This doll doesn't have rigid ankles; she can't afford to be so incredibly top-heavy.
I think the only other good solution would be to thread a wire through the hat instead of an elastic and just twist it under her chin to get it tight and fitted and unable to shift, but even then, my nail and hole solution adds an assurance of the hat not tipping forward or back in a way I'm not positive a tight wire band would achieve all by itself.
Even though this is not her Hatter per se, the closest Alice to set Maddie up against is, of course, the 1951 animated character, and the easiest way to get her was through the most immediate current Disney playline edition. I was making my first Disney Store order to get the Haunted Mansion werecat doll, so I threw Alice in my cart the night before the werecat drop to get both in one go.
I finally watched the Disney Alice and I wasn't much impressed. It feels aimless in a way the books somehow never did, and few of the interpretations and changes worked. I liked Alice falling into the "Drink Me" bottle when shrinking, using it as a vessel in the flood of tears. I thought it was smart to transpose the cat-anxiety gag onto the Dormouse rather than the usually-forgotten Mouse in the flood, plus it gives the Dormouse something to become alert for. The barrage of surrealist cartoon gags in the tea party was fun, and using Carroll's poem title "All In the Golden Afternoon" as the refrain of the flowers' original song was good. Otherwise, though, I didn't feel the film really "got it". Alice dreams of Wonderland as a place she'd prefer to reality, but the whole story in the book is a reflection of how unfair the real world can be to an innocent little kid, which adaptations almost never grasp. It's also astonishing to me that Kathryn Beaumont was eleven years old when she did her voice performance for the film. I thought she was a miscast 33-year-old. She didn't sound like a kid at all, and that was a negative in my eye. I guess she was very talented to sound so grown-up, though if she'd sounded her age, I think Alice would have been much easier to connect to.
The doll I got is Alice's newest "classic" edition translating the animated movie design. There's another current version with a pet and patterning on her dress, and I reject the Disney Alices that put florals on her apron. It doesn't work even a little. The Alice I chose doesn't seem to be a new edition, but rather a repackage of another recent preceding identical or nearly-identical release. But what a repackage it is. I'm about to praise Disney in ways I feel morally uncomfortable doing, but when they do something brilliant, I'm going to credit that.
This is the packaging this doll was evidently released with first.
Blah. Boring. Depressing reminder of the toy aisle's common sins.
This is the new box.
There's no window, but we get a beautiful photo presentation of Alice in the Wonderland flowers, and some nice motifs transferred over from the plastic-window box.
The box conveys the 1951 film's aesthetic well. It opens with a sealed flap on the bottom, with the whole front of the box lifting up to reveal a beautiful, delightful printed cardboard gate over the doll. This is stunning and absolutely unheard of in the modern toy sphere.
The gate has a key-shaped tab tucked into the other side which pops out to open the flaps, and the doll tray lifts out of the box, printed with the same backdrop of the White Rabbit's cottage as the tray.
This is so much more beautiful than the majority of doll packaging these days, and it's a breath of fresh air. It also reminds me that such a thing as "Disney magic" is/was a real phenomenon. This is enchanting by the standards of any playline doll package these days. I sincerely can't remember ever thinking a playline cheap Disney doll had attractive packaging, and that includes this doll's first release, but the new box is genuinely lovely.
You know what's better?
Alice is held in by two cardboard loops around her arms and one around her ankles.
She pulls out of them pretty easily without damaging the box, and there's just a bit of tissue to pull off her ankles. And that's it.
No plastic ANYTHING. No tags, no straps, no elastics. The only plastic in this package is the doll and her brush.
This is radical.
This style of packaging should be the today, tomorrow, and forever of fashion dolls. Disney has essentially proven that doll packaging can be much simpler and much more artistic and still stable and repackable. The ball's in...everyone's court here. This ought to be a revolution; other manufacturers ought to be put to shame. I am so completely impressed by the elegance of this box. It's great for parents with impatient kids who just want to get their doll out quick, and it's great for efficiency and the environment and the consumer/artistic experience. More of this always, please.
The only thing about the box that feels flawed is the inner flaps of the outer box repeating broken sections of print from the front.
The hairbrush is not worth discussing, though it has a "Disney Parks" logo on it that's intriguing. The doll isn't exclusive to them, but maybe if the Disney Store was still a brick-and-mortar institution, this Alice wouldn't be found there? Not sure. Maybe it's just an old mold originally associated with park-exclusive merch.
The doll herself is...not quite as chic as her packaging.
She starts on top with her black bow headband, quite distinctive to the Disney version of the Alice character. Alice first wore a headband in John Tenniel's illustrations for the second book, Through the Looking-Glass, while Disney made it a bow.
I greatly appreciate that this doll's headband is discreetly tagged to the sides of her head so it won't shift out of place. Loop headbands are a nightmare to work with on dolls, so to have one already placed and made to stay there? I love it.
Alice's hair follows her Disney styling. Blonde like the majority of Carroll Alices, but with center-parted bangs and a fluffy, wavy silhouette unique to Disney's take. The parting is combed through the headband but is left loose--sometimes this effect is done by tying the front of the hair behind the head, but not in this case. The hair is soft on top and gelled on the lower half into curls that need to be relaxed. This may be purely a packaging measure because it's not an accurate shape out-of-box. The bangs are not gelled, but with the band set in place, tidying them should be as easy as pulling the hair that's outside the band.
Alice's skintone is maybe more golden and less distinct from her hair than I expect it to be. Maybe a bit paler and pinker would look more accurate, but her face has the Disney doll style and a sweet expression with dark blue eyes glancing up to her left and berry-colored lips and pink blush.
Alice's costume is not the fanciest. Doll companies have yet to realize how sincerely cheap shiny satin actually looks compared to matte fabrics, and the material is outright illogical for Alice. Like, Belle should wear satin. Alice? No. The apron frills and lower half's edge are also unfinished, and the sleeves have some stray satin strings.
The blue satin's reflective metallic effect is pretty, even though it's nonsense, and the lace skirt trim looks good. The pinafore apron is not a separate layer. The top stops at the collar seam, while the waistband does wrap around the back, but it doesn't have loose strings or a tied effect. The band just continues to the edges of the velcro seam on the back of the costume.
The earlier Alice in the window box might have had trailing ribbon from an implied waist tie, unless this stock photo is from an even earlier version:
I will say, Alice weathers the cheap costuming of these basic playline dolls better than some of the Princesses. Her dress is simple enough that the texture is more of a class than the detail level. Despite me saying Belle should wear satin, she's a bit of a tragedy in this series.
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| And she knows it! I've never seen a more "I hate what I'm wearing but trying to be polite" face in a doll before. Poor Belle. |
Snow White doesn't look atrocious to me. I'm scared of her costume's unfinished edges, but her skintone looks more proper than the warmer color of the Fairytale Designer Collection doll, and I'd be delighted if her hair was better quality.
This Snow White doesn't have the guileless trusting face of the FDC doll; she looks pretty savvy. Her gaze is also cast the wrong direction for the setup I've put my dolls in...
...so I don't think tbe new Classic Snow White, even in the 2015 FDC outfit, would necessarily be a better display partner for the Witch, but Classic Snow White might be one of the least hampered by her cheapness in this collection. Ariel also fares well in these cases since her mermaid look isn't about fancy costume.
My biggest issue with the Alice doll is the absence of white tights. Her Mary Janes look wrong without at least some stockings. Her skirt is long enough that she could get away with long socks, though it immediately became obvious why she doesn't have them.
Alice is a little girl, six and a half or seven in the books, and pribably eleven or twelve in the film to match her voice actress and proportions? I was curious if the doll reflected that well or if she was shoved onto a teenaged-to-adult standard body sculpt. Turns out, she does, using a shorter, immature doll body design which I can only assume is shared by Tinker Bell.
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| 2015 collector Snow White is not the same body as the grown princesses in Alice's collection, but the proportions are the same. |
Alice isn't quite seven-year-old sized next to one of the older Princesses, but they run an age gamut of around fourteen to nineteen, so Snow White being one of the younger girls might make Alice properly-sized after all.
This body conparison looks pretty similar to the difference between Barbie's standard and petite sizes, so maybe an articulated petite Barbie body with the correct skintone would upgrade Alice. The petite dolls are not child sculpts, but Alice's costume ought to work fine with that body.
Alice's body has rubber click-knee legs, which I'm never delighted to see, and I'm sure this is why she has no tights, because that's a nightmare combo. The knees only hold a position with a single backward click, and at that point, why even bother? Disney flopped the hinge knees on the body my Snow White uses, but they could try again! Alice's legs are better cut so she can swing her hips forward without them spreading wide, while Snow White can only sit like she's been riding a horse for eight hours straight. Alice's other joints are good--she has a nice ball-jointed range in her head, and her shoulders and elbows are rotating hinges, though the elbows rotate through rough bumps, not a smooth 360 degrees. The pegs don't feel stuck and unresponsive like faulty Monster High elbows did a couple of years ago--they just don't turn in smooth circles She had some loose plastic from sloppy molding on one elbow that trimmed away easily enough. Her wrists have rotation but pretty limited hinge motion.
I boiled Alice's hair and washed out the gel. Two sections, one on each side, hung much longer and didn't seem to comb or lay in any logical way, like in front of Alice's torso, so I just cut them to the same length as the rest. I also loaned her a pair of white socks from one of my Skullector Grady Twins. If I can find a good fashion doll set with socks to harvest for Alice in the future, she'll get those, and the Grady girl will get her socks back after this review, regardless. It wasn't easy pulling them up Alice's thighs at all, but tided up, she has an undeniable charm.
I was able to pair Alice with my LEGO minifigure representation. (There's also been a minidoll figure, but I don't have her.)
My Barbie Kelly version of Disney Alice was irreparably deconstructed in service of my first Hatter Madness interlude, so she couldn't join the party. Here's a reminder of what she looked like.
I do feel a bit odd having unintentionally biased Hatter Madness so far toward the Disney 1951 version when this project is not about any pre-doll depictions of the Hatter idea! It just happened that Disney Alices cropped up twice, plus one doll based on the 1951 Hatter, and a Disney doll Hatter design unattached to a prior adaptation.
Alice is a cute doll, but she's cheap in ways that she shouldn't be. I'm not convinced we couldn't get cotton, plastic legs, finished edges, and good knee joints for the same price. The packaging is phenomenal, though.
I'm not sure there's a better playline depiction of the 1951 Alice than this recent release with the awesome box. There certainly could be, but preceding play dolls of Disney Alice aren't better than this one.
There have been plenty of collector Alices, and a few which age her up. Two variants of the same design, with different tiers of exclusivity, were just announced under this idea:
I think the fancier, rarer one with the blue apron clicks together better visually, and I love the mattes in her fabric, but I prefer this earlier doll, which is so impossible to get I'm never seriously going to think about her:
I have no desire for the Midnight Masquerade doll, but I do respect it.
I previously misidentified the MM series as Mattel's work, but it seems to be Disney Store/Disney direct, as Mattel did not take over making every Disney doll upon the reformation of their partnership. But you know what they did make? Maybe the best Disney Alice to date.
Released a couple of years ago for the Disney 100 anniversary, Mattel made a classic Alice with a polished costume and the gimmick of a miniature White Rabbit cottage playset that Alice can wear like she's growing out of it.
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| I mean, stop. it. |
I wish she was a total improvement over the Disney Store play doll, but the body build issues do give me pause. With wrist joints, tights, and the right body sculpt and shoes, I'd be eager to "upgrade" to this, but she clearly has her own deficits that put me back at hesitance to pursue her. Maybe the Fairytale Designer Collection Alice would be the better base doll with her evident tights and non-rubber legs(?), but even if I wanted her, she'd still be stuck with the newest doll's cheap playline satin clothes for my purposes. Or else maybe tights and a better Barbie body for Disney 100 Alice would be the answer. Undecided.
I might be better off pursuing Queens of Hearts from this adaptation. I don't adore the canon film design, and the Fairytale Designer collection edition looks messy in costume and body engineering, but I like the Midnight Masquerade doll, who has a better mold of the cartoon body design:
Disney Store dolls are really bad at engineering neck joints on anybody outside the princess shape. For boy dolls, the head molds are swivel joints which include the neck, even on taper-neck sculpts where turning the neck disrupts the contour by misaligning the sculpt.
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| Midnight Masquerade Hades looks like a totally spectacular doll, but his neck can't turn and look good! Same for Hercules here. |
Dolls like these should have the head enclose the top of the neck sculpt, with no neck on the head mold. The reverse was true for the first on-model Queen of Hearts (in the Fairytale Designer Collection), whose head mold included too little, creating a very distracting seam.
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| I also can't get past the giant heart on the chest. |
The Masquerade doll's molds look great.
This reimagining with a very different base body also looks good as her own separate thing and she's not hard to come by:
Through the glam adaptation, this particular Villains series skinnyfied both fat villains (the other being Ursula) in a way Disney maybe couldn't get away with today.
There's another Queen of Hearts oddly similar to this one, but with a closer costume to the film design and no annoying display case. She's way out of reach in terms of scarcity and price, though, and I think I prefer the design of the doll I just showed.
The final cover shot came next. I used red walls which could tint pink in post and cut out some shapes in teal to decorate the walls with for some of that Mary Blair visual style, and used a blue curtain on the wall. I added Alice and annoyed Maddie into the scene too. I lit the scene a bit darker and tried blacklight in a few places because I associate this Alice film with pops of color in dark voids and scenery, like the Tulgey Wood scene. Maddie's lighting could afford to go more "funhouse" as a result.
Maddie is very hard to use in a stand because of her weak ankles, tiptoe feet in flats, and heavy heavy head, so when the slippers drove me up the wall one time too many, I swapped in Bunny Blanc's signature EAH boots which are an absolutely perfect match for Maddie with their colors, Victorian style, and bunny theme. They also hide that she doesn't have full tights and give her feet more surface area to brace against the stand while forbidding her ankles from going bendy.
Despite Ever After High feet being significantly larger, Bunny's boots hug the Attractionistas legs very easily and fit just fine. Maddie can also wear Barbie or Mego female shoes, but I didn't have any that completed her aesthetically the way Bunny's boots absolutely do. Thank goodness I had them on hand. They kind of saved the doll, which is not a good thing, considering. If Maddie did have any deliberate "conversation" with Ever After High, then it's kind of the perfect payback that she's made better with EAH's help.
The slippers can go to an actual Barbie I'm working on. She might like to have some flats in her repertoire even though her feet are also high-heeled, and the color suits her. They fit the Barbie better than they do Maddie, anyhow.
Despite all this, Maddie was easier to stage in her own shoes for her cover-photo pose than Madeline, who ought to have had the weight and articulation advantages. I was able to place Maddie and keep her posed pretty well with her legs on two steps and her arm braced on the table, while I really wrestled and fought with Madeline to pose her on the ladder in her shoot.
Here's the parallel photoshoots compared.
I also added the wire chinstrap idea I talked about to keep the hat from falling off the head when the doll is turned on her back. I threaded wire through the hat, under the chin, and behind the ears, but it had to twist together on the side of the head where it could be hidden by the hair. Under the chin, the twist was too visible.
With Maddie's tea table build, I got a bit sarcastic. The table is deliberately designed to have some eerie but vague similarities to the one I designed for Madeline. I can't say I truly believe Maddie ripped her off, so the table exists in the same grey area as the dolls while still deliberately conversing with Madeline's table on my end. The multi-tabletops circle design could only be adapted to form the Mickey symbol.
I'm aware satirical idolatry isn't much different in effect from sincere idolatry. Oh, well.
Getting my "tea party" image for this doll required trial and error with three shoots until I found the perfect style for Maddie.
My first instinct was to lean into the park imagery of the boxes and frame the party against a brick wall outdoors.
Since the Mad Tea Party ride is spinning teacups, Alice gets to sit in the teacup mug, and I hung a pot from a tree branch and dressed the scene with some extras.
Cute, but not fully there for me.
While I was outside, I took a few more pictures for as long as I could stand the heat.
Then I went back to the red wall to try to stage things, replicating some steps from the cover shoot. First, I had the idea of using my wavy table shelf (itself designed for an Alice theme, with print on the back walls from the books which I painted over) as a setpiece. Then I kept it in the scene and restaged the tea party, putting Maddie on the cup "seat" and Alice inside a cup on the table.
Better. But what about my last idea? The cover needed to look more like a human tearoom in keeping with my previous posts, but Maddie's party was the opportunity to provide a more surrealist abstract void background with pattern and shape breaking it up--this was the vibe I really held in my heart as the aesthetic of the 1951 Alice, and wanted very badly to capture it. I think the result is fantastic.
I had to go back to the park-party staging with the more Tenniel-influenced composition (Hatter stood leaning against the table, Alice on the left), and this gave me my final party shot.
I wasn't going to let myself get a dud, and now I think I've been batting consistently. Each of these Hatters has their own aesthetic and identity, but I've gotten great work staging homages to the Tenniel art with each in their own way.
Here's a zoomed-out version expanding the "landscape". I liked the effect of the tilted angle and the curtain not cutting off the edge of the frame.
Alice and Maddie work well together despite, or perhaps, because of, their different art styles.
Alice looks more normal than some of the caricatured figures of Wonderland in the original book art and the Disney film, so Maddie standing in for the Hatter works fine with her more cartoonish face and oversized head next to Alice.
Photos with the Mickey table declared themselves finished when a prop fell over and a leg broke off the table. I'm fed up with this happening to me and the table got scrapped since I wasn't eager to repair it and delay things. It served its purpose. I only needed to keep Madeline's table around long enough to compare to Maddie's, so that can be taken apart now too. I only need to keep my second table.
Like I did with my extended tea project in 2024, I'm devoting a tableau in my room to house the dolls in the series and build a group over time. Here, I'm using table 2 to gather my Hatters and Alice paraphernalia around, with the space above and to the sides for the non-Hatters.
I will need to figure out what to do in October when I want this real estate for Halloween decoration. I also have a post in this series planned that month, so that's a conundrum.
So. What do I think of Maddie?
The harshest verdict isn't hard to draft. The Attractionistas concept reads as a dystopian fantasy about worshipping inaccessible theme parks and the corporation who built them, and the dolls themselves are posturing for a collector's-item status they do not earn. Maddie's hair fiber is awful quality, her hat is so heavy it passes into genuine incompetence, and the body design and articulation is disappointing for a collector piece, as well as for a cheaper playline doll. Those rubber legs were not worth it for such ineffective knee joints, and boots for footwear could have mitigated the poor visual of the leggings as well as fit better than those horrible slippers--because anything would fit better. Visually, as well, Maddie is less premiere than she wanted to be. Her doll is less detailed and colorful than her artwork, and this creates a very understandable level of suspicion when her simplified design debuted into a doll world that had a highly similar character, making Attrstas. Maddie look like a ripoff without individual identity. Producing the doll depicted in the art would have created a parallel character above suspicion. Producing the doll we got created a doll that, falsely or not, portrayed Disney as having a petty hangup about Mattel doing fairy tales their own way. And if the doll needed to be simplified from her concept art, there were easy ways to maintain the concept traits which would have stood Maddie better on her own two feet...at least, if she had a doll stand. 'Cause she doesn't, and isn't primed to use one easily either with her bendy legs and heavy heavy hat.
This all makes Maddie seem rather hollow, shoddy, and soulless. Ever and on she spins in devotion to the Disney Parks, where the souvenir shops tell you their substandard products of dubious creative identity are pure magic worth treasuring.
On the other hand, it's not terribly hard to be charitable to Maddie either. Her visual design is charming and cohesive. Her face is one of the best sculpt/paint pairings in the Attractionistas line, and her articulation gives her a decent amount of character. Her outfit doesn't feel inexcusably cheap, and her dress is nicely made. I also like her pet and his fabric neck bow. Maddie also slots really well into the fifties surrealist tones that define the 1951 Alice, courtesy of artist Mary Blair. The aesthetic of the 1951 film is maybe my favorite thing about it, and this doll feels at home in that visual style. She could be the most authentic of any Attractionista regarding the match to the source material's tone and style.
Maddie being so in step with the movie also means that I can't say she has no vibe of her own. Her differences from Madeline prevent them from being aesthetically interchangeable. Like, Maddie may look like Madeline, but she doesn't look like an Ever After High character, if that makes sense. On the flipside, Madeline doesn't look like 1950s cartoons. They couldn't step into each others' media and that does help Maddie's case.
She's just not good enough. I'm quite charmed by Maddie visually, but she's easily the worst-made of the Hatters I've selected so far. My Storyland Madame Alexander Hatter had some issues with the visual of his hat that needed correcting, and his elastic aged badly. I've also noticed his shoe soles getting stuck to the surfaces I stand him on and leaving residue, so he's sitting now, but I otherwise have no real gripes. The Silver Label Barbie Hatter put on a very clean show. His outfit is nicely-made, his paint and sculpt are brilliant, and he just clicks. Original Madeline Hatter doesn't have much to brag about in the hair game compared to Maddie, sure, and her face poorly portrayed her personality until the reboot that harmed every other character but she's otherwise a doll you can do more with, and a new Madeline wouldn't have any glaring frustrations or flaws. Maddie is cute and I like her look a lot, but she has issues that can't be overlooked. If there was a way to make her hat weigh less, or if there was a superior body in this shape and color, I'd be able to forge a brighter relationship with her, but I'm stuck with keeping her near to her factory state, which just isn't a satisfying toy. Poor Maddie. She ought to have been more than she is.
Attractionistas Maddie is a visual delight--there can be no doubt about that. But she might have done equally well and been equally charming as a statue or even just a drawing. This character design ought to be a wonderful doll, but Disney somehow managed to make the doll medium feel like the worst possible way to bring this character to life. Oh, for the world where the Attractionistas were made by Mattel rather than competing with them. A Mattel rendition would likely be very solid.
Gracey, girl? Get ready for a new body. Clearly, you'll need it.
My next Hatter Madness post (5/6) is planned for October, so that's a gap of two months without another entry unless I do another interlude. During that lull time, I'm taking readers to The Haunted Mansion (which means I cannot use abbreviations now that I have two projects initialed "HM!"), sharing a stalled custom doll project, and maybe also taking this blog into dolly outer space for a spell!
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