Smoking caterpillar yields parental guidance advisory

Tim Burton takes you down a darker rabbit hole

By Zaren White

Alice In Wonderland Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway, Crispin Glover, Michael Sheen, Alan Rickman, and Stephen Fry Walt Disney Pictures 109 minutes Rated PG

By Zaren White

The psychedelic, nonsensical dreamscape that surrounds the story of Alice made Tim Burton’s directorship of a live-action adaptation no surprise. A master of the grotesque, whimsical, and bizarre, Burton was a convincing choice for a Wonderland remark. While the film’s title follows that of the famous animated Disney version, Alice In Wonderland, the original source material, Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel, is actually called Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Burton’s adaptation conflates elements of this novel with Carroll’s 1872 sequel, Through The Looking-Glass, And What Alice Found There, for a drastically altered, action-injected, Johnny Depp-laden film that, while containing shout-outs to the story’s beloved and memorable Wonderlandians, deviates so far from Carroll’s story that it can really only be called “loosely based.”

In this version, appropriately set in the original story’s nineteenth-century England, a 19-year-old Alice (Wasikowska), curious and imaginative and not at all eager to marry a bozo friend of the family with digestive problems, is distracted during a highbrow garden party by what appears to be a white rabbit in a waistcoat with a pocket watch.

We’ve already learned that Alice has been having loopy dreams since childhood during which her unconventional father told her she was bonkers, but all the best people are. Alice takes a tumble down a particularly frightening and dynamic rabbit hole. Once she makes her way through the door into Wonderland, she meets the gleefully suave and iconic Cheshire Cat, fat twin boys Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and many other crazy critters who tell her that she is Alice but perhaps not the “right Alice.”

Either way, some Alice or another is the much-anticipated champion who is going to slay the Jabberwocky and overthrow the Red Queen – at least, according to a crazy caterpillar smoking a hookah pipe (voiced by Professor Snape, er, Alan Rickman). This is where the adaptation goes off the rail and the film must be viewed as a stand-alone piece.

The movie is very plot- and conflict-driven. It conflates the characters of the Queen of Hearts from Alice’s Adventures and the Red Queen from Through The Looking Glass to depict a Narnia-style fantasy land that a rogue monarch has usurped from the rightful ruler – the White Queen (Hathaway). As any Hollywoodified adaptation pre-supposes certain sell-out alterations to the original, and as Alice has nothing resembling a love story, a male protagonist was needed for balance.

And thus the diminutive, old, minimally present Mad Hatter of the story becomes, well, Johnny Depp, in a much more exciting and visually appealing character, frizzy orange hair and all.

Thus The Hatter becomes Alice’s main sidekick and a moral centre of courage and righteousness. Alice may be the main character, but we all know Burton loves Johnny best. Despite its outrageous deviations from Carroll’s original, Burton’s adaptation is effective for taking the curious absurdity of Wonderland and endowing it with the linearity and high-tension stakes that a mainstream motion picture demands.

Alice is not a little girl, but deliberately placed on the brink of adulthood, returning to the fantasy world she remembers in childhood dreams.

For a story based on its kooky characters, the most notable strength is the spot-on character portrayals. From Wasikowska’s ethereal and resilient Alice to Bonham Carter’s disturbingly large-headed Red Queen to a fusion of all of Depp’s wackadoo roles in the Mad Hatter, Alice is all about eccentricity.

A laundry list of adjectives could describe the fantastic visionary style and special effects of Burton’s rendering of Wonderland, which is mesmerizing, but the best take-away of Alice In Wonderland is actually thematic – imagination is precious and we’re all as mad as hatters and march hares.

3.5 out of 4 stars

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