![]() ![]() ![]() The film is enchanting in its mordant way until, unfortunately, it arrives at its third act. The Queens, the Mad Hatter, Alice, the Knave of Hearts ( Crispin Glover) and presumably Tweedledee and Tweedledum are versions of humans the others are animated, voiced with great zest by such as Stephen Fry (Cheshire), Alan Rickman (Absolem the Caterpillar), Michael Sheen (White Rabbit), Christopher Lee (Jabberwocky), Timothy Spall (Bayard) and Barbara Windsor (Dormouse). ![]() To be sure, the insecure White Queen doesn't exhaust herself in making Alice welcome. The Red Queen wishes her ill, and the White Queen ( Anne Hathaway) wishes her well, perhaps because both are formed according to the rules of Wonderland queens. This is a Wonderland that holds perils for Alice, played by Wasikowska with beauty and pluck. Whoever he plays (Edward Scissorhands, Sweeney Todd, Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, Ichabod Crane), he is that character through and through. The ringleader is the Mad Hatter, played by Johnny Depp, that rare actor who can treat the most bizarre characters with perfect gravity. Do they reproduce? Most species seem to have only one member, as if nature quit while she was ahead. At the moment of truth in the wedding ceremony, she impulsively scampers away to follow another rabbit down another rabbit hole and finds below that she is actually remembered from her previous visit.īurton shows us Wonderland as a perturbing place where the inhabitants exist for little apparent reason other than to be peculiar and obnoxious. When we meet her again, Alice has decidedly mixed feelings about her original trip down the rabbit hole, but begins to recall Wonderland more favorably as she's threatened with an arranged marriage to Hamish Ascot ( Leo Bill), a conceited snot-nose twit. (The landscape was designed by Robert Stromberg of " Avatar.") Why you can see the sky from beneath the earth is not a fair question. Wonderland itself is not limited to necessary props, such as a tree limb for the Cheshire Cat and a hookah for the Caterpillar, but extends indefinitely as an alarming undergrowth beneath a lowering sky. They're grotesques, as they should be, from the hydrocephalic forehead of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) to Tweedledee and Tweedledum ( Matt Lucas), who seem to have been stepped on. These are not retreads of familiar cartoon images. He brings to Carroll's characters an appearance as distinctive and original as Tenniel's classic illustrations. ![]() No artist who can create these images is enhancing them in any way by adding the annoying third dimension. It was a wise idea by Burton and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, to devise a reason that Alice ( Mia Wasikowska) is now a grown girl in her late teens, revisiting a Wonderland that remains much the same, as fantasy worlds must always do.īurton is above all a brilliant visual artist, and his film is a pleasure to regard I look forward to admiring it in 2-D, where it will look brighter and more colorful. " Alice" plays better as an adult hallucination, which is how Burton rather brilliantly interprets it until a pointless third act flies off the rails. It reminds me of uncles who tickle their nieces until they scream. There's even a little sadism embedded in Carroll's fantasy. Tim Burton's new 3-D version of "Alice in Wonderland" answers my childish questions. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |