Alice in Wonderland is one of the greatest and most long-lasting works of fantasy in the English language, and it’s fitting that the filmic fantastist Tim Burton gets the chance to apply to it his own visual imagination. It was never going to be totally “faithful” to the original work; Burton’s own imaginative world is so strong and so idiosyncratic that it was always going to be Tim Burton in Wonderland.
Burton’s Alice is not the seven-year-old of Lewis Carroll’s original, but the grown-up version of the same girl: she’s now 19 and of marriageable age. The frame of the film has this 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) attending a vast garden party at a very stately home, where she is to be proposed to by the ginger-haired ponce who is the scion of this rich family.
Of course Alice rebels — we have been shown that she’s a free spirit by her reluctance to wear a corset. It’s no surprise when she leaves her would-be fiancé embarrassingly on his knees in the gazebo while she chases after a white rabbit.
We know what happens once Alice goes after a white rabbit, especially when the rabbit disappears down a hole in the ground and Alice follows. It’s easy to see the Wonderland into which she enters as a refusal of adulthood, and that would chime with the eternally virginal Carroll’s own adoration for young girls. That does not appear to be paedophilia as we’d see it today. The very idea of sex would have horrified Carroll —Â that was way too adult. Rather, his affection for children (he said he loved children — except boys) was a way to keep adulthood at bay and stay in the wonderland of childhood.
Burton’s film rather fudges this issue, giving the movie’s frame a vague acceptance of adulthood in what happens to Alice once she returns from Wonderland at the end. We all have to return from Wonderland eventually and take arms against the sea of troubles that is being grown-up, but in this case any investment in such realism seems particularly unconvincing. Burton’s heart is not in adulthood at all.
In Wonderland, though, his imagination can soar. He’s as free as a child at play. Using Carroll and the original illustrator John Tenniel’s visions of Wonderland as building blocks, Burton reinvigorates this surreal, perhaps subterreanean landscape with his own brand of whimsy, giving it all the benefits of his style of Gothic Lite.
This world looks truly wondrous, part overlit dream and part cavernous gloom. The mix of live-action performance and computer-generated animation is seamless. I particularly liked the fully animated creatures — the “frumious Bandersnatch” and the Cheshire Cat. They are furry and gummy and toothy in a way that speaks of childhood fear and wonder more powerfully than the usual dead surface of CGI does. To my mind, this imaginary world is infinitely superior to that of Avatar.
Burton’s favourite male actor, Johnny Depp, plays the Mad Hatter, and appears to be having a lot of fun doing it. He’s gap-toothed, orange-haired and ghoulishly pale, and can switch from glee to sadness and back with the swiftness of a child (or a lunatic). Annoyingly, though, Depp rolls through a range of different accents for no discernable reason — is this perhaps a joke tribute to Marlon Brando in The Missouri Breaks?
Burton’s favourite female actor (well, she’s his wife), Helena Bonham-Carter, plays the peevish Red Queen with a literally swollen head. She’s a lot of fun, too, even up against the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), who’s supposed to be good where the Red Queen is bad and is hence a lot less entertaining.
This Alice in Wonderland, too, submits to a more goal-oriented storyline than Carroll’s original. Instead of the original story’s picaresque, more a puzzle in a labyrinth than a directed storyline, Burton and scriptwriter Linda Woolverton merge bits of the first Alice book (properly titled Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) with Jabberwocky, the poem that features in the second Alice book (Alice through the Looking-Glass), to provide the film with forward momentum.
The famous nonsense poem (“‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe …”) is about the slaying of a monster called the Jabberwock. That gives Burton’s film a goal and a more heroic role for Alice. (I think the poem’s title Jabberwocky is to the monster, the “Jabberwock”, as Iliad is to the city Ilium —Â a Jabberwocky is a poem about a “Jabberwock”. But everyone refers to the monster as the “Jabberwocky” in the movie.)
This hybridised narrative helps keep the viewer engaged; it pulls one onward. The film is entertaining, occasionally amusing, and, as I said, it looks great —Â though, I have to say, it was ruined for me by the fact that it’s in 3D. Apart from the irritation of having to sit through the film with cheap plastic spectacles on one’s face (I constantly find myself lifting a hand to pluck them off), 3D has the weird effect of making one feel as though the film is out of focus while at the same time too sharp. I at least end up feeling like I’ve been squinting throughout, and despite the allegedly superior visual experience of 3D I feel as though I haven’t in fact seen all of the film.
In that light (or darkness), I hope I have given a reasonably comprehensive account of this Alice in Wonderland. Unless you particularly like 3D, I’d suggest trying to catch it in 2D — there are, in fact, more ordinary prints out there than 3D prints. Burton’s Wonderland doesn’t need gimmicks.
For a trailer of Alice in Wonderland, plus interviews with Tim Burton and others, go to www.mg.co.za/alice