And yes, it’s full of 3-D and Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter and director Tim Burton love for dark, scarred skeletal men and pale pretty brunettes with generous foreheads.
But the surreal sensation of sweetness of the original books has been lost. What I always felt like an English garden party gone slightly off has been replaced by the grotesque and the gothic and the exaggerated.
We know we’re in for some changes as soon as we meet Alice — a fatherless 19-year-old about to be married off. She doesn’t love the boy, though, and doesn’t see a way out — until soon, fortuitously, she stumbles down a rabbit hole into a magical world.
The story has already encountered, however, although in a more familiar feel-good empowerment Disney Fantasy. This is not necessarily a bad thing, screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, wrote some of the best (including “Mulan” and “Lion King”).
But the “Alice” books aren’t about Believing in Yourself or Being the Best “You” You Can Be or any of those other nice self-esteem slogans.
There are no nothing, in fact – except fantasy and word play and style of the 19th century in the jokes that now require footnotes.
So what Woolverton and Burton have done is taken the work of Carroll – vaporously as elusive as the Cheshire Cat – and tried to make it look and act like other things.
Woolverton bit imported other fantasies. The Mad Hatter is more like the Scarecrow of Oz, a best friend, Alice lost the brave. And the plot feels like the dream of a typical snack of Narnia Wales, with magic, mad usurpers, brave mice and a virgin champion in shining armor.
Burton, meanwhile, has played out their own fantasies, criticized landscapes, scenes from the disfigurement and the Red Queen, his forehead the size of a poster (the director was clearly obsessed with Elsa Lanchester at an early age – to their heroines, and love, all look remarkably the same.)
His current partner, Helena Bonham Carter plays the Red Queen, and she is the best thing in the film – a smug, imperious crazy.
And as his right-hand winding manic, Crispin Glover is finally a film by Tim Burton, the place I was born to be.
However, Johnny Depp – as in all his collaborations with Burton – dangerously has been abandoned to their fate. His Mad Hatter occasionally inexplicably falls into a strawberry in Scotland, also makes an adventurer Errol Flynnish and a strange double jointed Electric Boogaloo. It’s not as crazy as simply irrelevant.
For the rest of the film is a mixture of styles, techniques – and effectiveness.
Froggy Footmen the Red Queen are wonderfully inventive fact, the March Hare and the Dormouse sub-Disney feel. Anne Hathaway, which began in princess parties, plays the White Queen with a big wink, Mia Wasikowska, who is the adult Alice, comes across as a younger, more opaque Gwyneth Paltrow.
“Unlike last year’s” A Christmas Carol “, the study has not attempted to check this particular film, it is not, officially,” Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. “That makes sense because in reality it is not. This is, unquestionably,” Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland “- Lewis Carroll and not, perhaps, not yours.
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