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It’s perhaps the most famous and definitive feature adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s beloved novels, with characters that are incredibly memorable and designed more vividly and visually splendid than any other version, even though it’s animated and only two-dimensional. With Disney’s family friendly touches, the ideas are enjoyable, the songs are intelligently tongue-twisting, and the events are hilariously nonsensical. Weirdness borders on such a fine line with obnoxious, yet Alice in Wonderland knows just how to turn utter absurdity into a singing, dancing occasion of mindless fun. “If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.” Young Alice daydreams of colorful creatures and mind-boggling adventures while her older sister dryly recites a history lesson from a book with no pictures in it. Just as Alice is wondering aloud about the fun she could be having, she spies a rabbit with a waistcoat and a watch scurrying about as if terribly late for a very important date. When she follows the white critter into a hole, she takes a tumble several miles downward and ends up in a small room with a locked door. |
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Before she knows it, she’s on a magical and mysterious odyssey in Wonderland, where she’ll grow and shrink in size repeatedly and meet a humming dodo, the baffling twins Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, singing flowers, bread butterflies, a hookah-smoking caterpillar, the inimitable Cheshire Cat (voiced by Winnie the Pooh’s Sterling Holloway), the tea-obsessed Mad Hatter, an even madder March Hare, a drunken dormouse, waddling duck-like bike horns, birds with shovel beaks, owls with accordion necks, a dog with a broom for a head, walking playing cards, the croquet-loving tyrant Queen of Hearts and many more peculiar beings. By the end of it all, she’ll even stand trial for teasing, tormenting and otherwise annoying the Queen and causing her to lose her temper. Sentence first, verdict afterwards. In this unexplainably bizarre land, it’s a good thing everyone is so preoccupied with celebrating their un-birthdays. “It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change,” observes Alice, one of Disney’s most endearing protagonists, who talks to herself, gives herself counseling and remains just as imaginative, creative, curious and odd as the creatures and normally inanimate objects she converses with. She scares easily, but her voyage into the idiotic unknown is never nightmarish, and when she learns a thing or two about following good advice, it’s not preachy. What makes the film so ingenious, lighthearted and riotously silly are the expressive characters that often speak in rhyme, the horrifyingly sad story about a walrus that eats baby oysters with cute, fat-cheeked faces, and the ever present songs that are catchy, fun and fit more perfectly than many of Disney’s other animated features in which songs were thrown in just for the sake of having characters sing. “Most everyone’s mad here,” explains the Cheshire Cat. That’s the beauty of Wonderland. Just about any unnatural, kooky thing works better in the undefined fantasy world, full of great dialogue that is witty and illogical without being annoying. And what a grand ending too – it’s a dream, as we knew from the start, but it concludes simply, smartly, and without dwelling on anything unnecessarily. - Mike Massie
Click HERE to read the Interview with Tim Burton Click HERE to read the Interview with Anne Hathaway Click HERE to read the Theatrical Review of Alice in Wonderland in 3D (2010)
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