Alice in Wonderland (review)

"You've brought us the wrong Alice," complains the Dormouse in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. Even the Mad Hatter, Alice's strongest defender, in this new film adaptation acknowledges that something is different about this Alice—she seems to have lost her "muchness." Director Tim Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton make it clear that this is a different sort of Alice from that of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). I suspect there is an inverse relationship between Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: the more you like the Alice books, the more you are probably going to dislike Burton's film adaptation.

But the title of the film is intended to alert viewers that this is Burton's vision of Alice, which is only loosely based on the two Alice books. Burton's film primarily focuses on the characters and episodes from Carroll's darker Through the Looking-Glass (1871) rather than the more upbeat Wonderland. Burton adds his signature nightmare approach to the film. This is not a film version of the Alice books, but a film that uses significant characters borrowed from the Alice books to create a new story or continuation of the Alice books. In this regard, Burton's film is reminiscent of Gavin Miller's 1985 film, Dreamchild, in that an older Alice revisits Wonderland. However, in Dreamchild it is an eighty-year-old Alice reflecting on the books and her friendship with Lewis Carroll. In Burton's film Alice is a fetching, independent nineteen-year-old contemplating a marriage proposal to a pretentious, titled young man. Unlike Dreamchild, Lewis Carroll is absent in this film as are his stand-ins, the Dodo and the White Knight. I think Burton's film would more be more appropriately titled Return to Wonderland, although that title has already been used by Raven Gregory for one of his comic books in his Tales of Wonderland series. Burton's Alice in Wonderland relates to Carroll's Alice books in the same way that Walter Murch's 1985 film Return to Oz relates to L. Frank Baum's Oz series.

What is striking about Burton's film is the number of film allusions it contains. He has created a postmodern pastiche of fantasy films. He references many of his previous films, including Nightmare before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd, Corpse Bride, and Planet of the Apes. Screenwriter Linda Woolverton has helped in the writing of Disney films such as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, so the film also includes a number of references to Disney films, including the opening taken directly from the Disney-animated Peter Pan. Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter is a combination of Disney's Peter Pan, the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz combined with Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of the Caribbean series and the Joker from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. There are plenty of references to Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz and the Broadway musical Wicked, Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, and C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The last two films were inspired by the success of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, so that is in here, too. Burton's film reduces the two Alice books to an extended chase scene and a big battle sequence. The relationship between the Red and White Queens is borrowed from Gregory Maguire's Wicked. The fighting Dormouse owes a great deal to Kate DiCamillo's The Tales of Despereaux. The film's frame, which links characters from the real world to Alice's fantasy world, echoes the Kansas/Oz parallel of Fleming's The Wizard of Oz.

Woolverton seems to acknowledge some problems within the script. The running theme throughout the film is whether this is the "right" Alice. The Wonderland characters frequently ask the White Rabbit...