‘Alice’s Wonderland Bakery’: Recipes for Real Life, if Not Real Kitchens - The New York Times

A new Disney show teaches children useful lessons in the guise of a cooking show. The recipes are less practical (unless you stock dancing dodo eggs).

Everyone eats.

That simple truth, which has persuaded even quarreling heads of state to sit down together, has now inspired a new television series that aims to teach another frequently fractious group — children ages 2 to 7 — cooperation, compassion and cultural literacy. Disney has taken on this challenge in “Alice’s Wonderland Bakery,” a novel blend of sweetness and spice that uses globally inspired food to help little viewers master resilience and adaptability.

Debuting on Wednesday on the Disney Channel, Disney Junior and the streaming service Disney+, the show takes its brightly colored universe and rapid-fire surprises from “Alice in Wonderland,” the company’s fantastical — and fantastically food-filled — 1951 animated feature film of the classic Lewis Carroll story.

“We had been looking at doing something with ‘Alice’ for a while,” Joe D’Ambrosia, the senior vice president for original programming and general manager at Disney Junior, said in a telephone interview. “And we also had really been trying to find a cooking show for preschoolers.”

This half-hour animated series is not, however, a traditional cooking show with recipes to follow. Although D’Ambrosia said he hoped it would inspire families to bake together, you won’t find ingredients like dancing dodo eggs and shrinking powder in your pantry. Instead, the dishes the series features — some entirely fanciful, like dwindling dewdrop cake, and others based on the real world, like gingerbread — become vehicles for creativity and problem-solving. The show’s Alice may concoct something delectable so she can make a new friend, comfort an old one or show how a situation, just like a recipe, can be approached in more than one way.

Alice, who relies on the magical talking cookbook of her great-grandmother, the original movie’s heroine, “uses food as essentially her superpower,” said Chelsea Beyl, the series’s executive producer and showrunner. “This is, you know, how she connects with all these curious and peculiar characters.”

Some of those characters have hardly changed since the 1951 film’s premiere. The series’s Cheshire Cat, with his indelible grin and magenta stripes, and Alice’s feline companion, Dinah, could have leapt right out of one of the old movie’s frames. Others have transformed or become diverse versions of the figures that inspired them. (This is a multicultural Wonderland.) Alice herself is not the film’s preadolescent English schoolgirl but a very American-seeming 7- or 8-year-old, running her own bakery inside a giant teacup. (In Wonderland, all things are possible.)

“In the movie, you know she’s thinking,” said Frank Montagna, the co-executive producer and art director for the show, which uses computer-generated animation to create a heightened version of the film’s world. “And so we wanted to really home in on that part of our Alice — that, you know, she’s always trying to figure things out.”

That entails trial and error for her, including at least one spectacular failure: In the pilot, the birthday cake Alice has baked for Princess Rosa, a new character who is the daughter of the formidable Queen of Hearts, has magic sprinkles that unexpectedly fly onto all the royal guests, causing the disgusted queen to end the palace festivities. (Pandemic-weary children will probably identify with the disappointment of a canceled birthday party.)

To redeem herself and cheer up Rosa the next day, Alice hosts an intimate unbirthday celebration, a concept found in both the 1951 film and Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass.” This cake isn’t ordinary, either.

Alice “is very, very curious,” said Libby Rue, 13, who is making her TV debut as the heroine’s voice. “Her curiosity sometimes gets the best of her, but she is very kind, and she loves making her friends happy by baking.”

Other series characters get into trouble, too, like Alice’s best friend, Fergie, a descendant of the White Rabbit who appears in the book and the film. In one episode, Fergie struggles by himself to help Alice bake a huge order of pies and then lies, as a small child might, about what he did wrong. When the truth comes out, Alice reassures him that it’s always all right to ask for help.

Disney

In creating Fergie and the other Wonderland characters, the concern was “to really be reflective of today’s young audiences,” D’Ambrosia said, which also meant giving them origins that Carroll might never have dreamed of.

Rosa and the Queen of Hearts, for instance, look and sound Hispanic, practicing customs inspired by Cuba’s. (Because the characters come from Wonderland, their habits are sometimes inspired by the real world but are not, technically, of it.) Dad Hatter, patterned after the host of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, and his dapper son, Alice’s friend Hattie, reflect Japanese traditions — a nod, Beyl said, to the importance of tea in that country’s culture.

Later in the 25-episode first season, the show will introduce a caterpillar family whose influences are Persian. (Parents will be relieved that the lead caterpillar, familiar to Wonderland fans, is blowing bubbles instead of smoking a hookah.) The show’s creators have also made some formerly male characters female, and the queen herself is now merely a diva instead of a homicidal tyrant.

Bringing diversity to Carroll’s work “means a lot,” said Eden Espinosa, who voices the queen and is herself the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, “because I feel like it is acknowledging that these classics — although there might not have been representation in them when they were, you know, brand-new — they transcend culture lines.”

The food also reflects the ethnicities the series embraces. In an episode in which Alice and Princess Rosa bake apple crumble pastelitos, this Cuban pastry functions as a preschooler’s version of Proust’s madeleine, reminding the King of Hearts (Rosa’s grandfather, voiced by the Cuban American singer Jon Secada) of the wife he misses so much. Another episode highlights mochi, Japanese rice cakes.

But at a time of national concern over childhood obesity, the executive producers have taken special care not to build the entire series around desserts.

“We have a lot of episodes that are about, you know, Fergie growing veggies in his garden, which I think is really fun for kids to see and maybe want to do,” Beyl said. Even in references to sweet recipes, she added, “we rarely say ‘sugar.’”

Young viewers will also watch Alice make dishes that include vegetables or fruits, like a carrot calzone, grape gazpacho, huevos habaneros and kuku sibzamini (Persian potato patties).

“It was really cool to not only bring the cultural elements into the food, but the music, the costumes, the casting and the set as well,” Beyl said.

For example, “The Baking Song,” written and composed by the show’s music director, John Kavanaugh, recurs throughout the series in different ways: The queen sings a salsa version, while the caterpillar episode has a version featuring Persian instruments. The series also incorporates tunes from the 1951 movie, like “The Unbirthday Song,” and other work by Kavanaugh, such as “Food for Thought,” which conveys series themes like flexibility. (Alice believes there’s a recipe for anything or, as she puts it, “Where there’s a whisk, there’s a way.”)

The musical emphasis — this month, Walt Disney Records will release a digital soundtrack album from the show — also called for singing talent, so in addition to Espinosa, who has starred in “Wicked,” the voice cast includes Broadway veterans like James Monroe Iglehart (“Aladdin”) and Mandy Gonzalez (“Hamilton”). Several comics are featured, too, like Donald Faison, Craig Ferguson and the “Saturday Night Live” alumni Ana Gasteyer, Bobby Moynihan and Vanessa Bayer.

According to Montagna, “We really tried to push the comedic performances,” while also “pushing the boundaries of what preschool entertainment can be.”

“We didn’t want people to compare this with any storybook environment or other Disney shows,” he added. “We wanted it to stand out as Wonderland.”

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