After three years of anticipating what I expected to be Tim Burton's most magnificent creation of his career, Alice in Wonderland is everything I ever wanted it to be. Though I am not entirely familiar with the original storybook by Lewis Carroll, I imagine he is giggling with madness in his grave. I may be biased as a self-proclaimed Tim Burton maniac, but I could not imagine any other director making this film with such acuteness (I heard Steven Spielberg was approached initially). It's nice to see Burton reunite with Disney on this project after twenty years of desperately trying to break away from their conglomerate. Perhaps it was the only way for him to execute the Disney Digital 3D effects with such finesse.
True to it's original intent, the film is like a strung out trip on a path to to finding ones own identity, no matter how mad - or bonkers - it makes you. It starts with Alice as a young woman, trying to escape an engagement and falling down the rabbit hole once again into this strange Wonderland. She doesn't realize that she was there thirteen years before as a young girl, even when all the characters in her "dream" insist they know her. Burton weaves the audience through the imagery and the characters that we know so well from the cartoon we saw as children, adding of course his own special touch that excites us and keeps us on the edge of our seats. Do not be mistaken; this is in no way anything like Disney's 1951 Alice in Wonderland. It's dark and twisted and frightening and it stretches your imagination until you find yourself as mad as the Hatter himself.
Speaking of the Hatter, Johnny Depp nailed it. He shined as a supporting actor, without stealing the show as one might expect him to in such a colorful role. (Burton tried to achieve this with Depp when he did Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, even changing the title from the original "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" - alas he failed when poor Charlie was outshone by Willy's awkward bowl cut and creepy flashbacks). The audience was free to delight in the acting skills of Anne Hathaway, who played the White Queen with such charisma, gracefully flailing her arms around and floating through her pristine castle like a housewife on Quaaludes. Helena Bonham Carter plays her evil sister, the Red Queen. She masterfully brings a sense of naive vanity to the character, whilst managing to terrify all her subjects. And let's not forget about Mia Wasikowska in her breakthrough role as the one and only Alice. Everything about her - even down to the way her hair falls - echoes the perplexing journey that is Alice in Wonderland. All the little side characters including the caterpillar (voiced by Alan Rickman), the hare, the mouse, the Tweedles and the dog keep the audience in check and allow us to escape the fact that we're watching a blockbuster film. Like all of Burton's films, the characters are what move the plot.
It never hit me when I saw the cartoon as a child just how much this film echoes the storyline of The Wizard of Oz. A girl falls through a time warp and lands in a mysterious place with odd characters and dream-like occurrences, to be told by everyone she meets that she was brought there to bring down the evil sister and return the land to it's once peaceful balance. She falls in love with these characters and finds it hard to leave. The difference is, Dorothy goes home because she misses her family; Alice goes home because she has decisions to inform people of, life-altering decisions that seemed too vast to handle before her trip down the rabbit hole. But after a trip such as Wonderland, Alice can handle anything.
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