down the rabbit-hole

New Images From Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland | Comingsoon.net

Tim Burton’s remake of Alice – probably the movie I’ve been most anticipating, and dreading, since I first heard about it last September – has finally released its first preview images! The link I’ve posted above includes two that I haven’t seen before, including close ups of Mia Wasikowska as Alice and Matt Lucas’s Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Much as anything related to Disney and entitled “Alice in Wonderland” makes me twitch, because it smacks of the common hodgepodge amalgamation of both books that so well encapsulates a plethora of generic assumptions and simplifications of all things Alice, the fact that it was Tim Burton directing gave me a dull glimmer of optimism. And it was with enormous relief that I found out a while ago it’d be a sequel where an older Alice returns to Wonderland, rather than a movie based on the books. It actually sounds an awful lot like American McGee’s Alice, which makes me wonder if there was some unconscious, unacknowledged influence in Burton’s conception of the plot… though it’s much less dark than the game.

The good thing about it being a sequel is that my one of my biggest fears has been totally dealt with – that the books would become horribly mangled in an attempt to give the film’s stars their fair share of screen time. The Hatter, played by Johnny Depp, only gets one chapter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and a few scant pages in Through the Looking-Glass. And really you don’t see all that much of many of the other characters; they come and go very quickly as Alice muddles through the story.

And overall, the first impression I get from the released images is very, very positive: the landscapes are absolutely stunning, Alice has just the right amount of steely primness and vulnerability, Helena Bonham Carter’s Queen of Hearts looks appropriately insane and imperious, and Anne Hathaway’s White Queen is absolutely my favourite. The ever helpful Wiki article on the film informs me that her character doesn’t walk, but float, and I think that is totally perfect for the character! I can really see the vagueness, randomness and kind but scatterbrained nature of the White Queen coming out of that picture – less enthusiastic about the fact that Hathaway plans to play her as “cute but psycho”, as I really don’t think the White Queen is that psycho, but I quite like Anne Hathaway as an actress. So we’ll see.

Things I’m less enthusiastic about include the fact that they’ve combined the Queen of Hearts and Red Queen in Bonham Carter’s character (why? why? why? as if most people aren’t already confused enough about the two – if they wanted a character just to shout “Off with his head!” they could just have kept the Queen of Hearts and axed the Red Queen), and Johnny Depp’s weirdly clownlike Hatter. The typically Disney addition of mad is one I can live with, since although he was never called the Mad Hatter in the books, the word “mad” and plenty of madness does occur during the tea-party scene in particular. But… I am unconvinced that the excess of white makeup and Ronald-McDonald-esque wig are necessary. Johnny Depp is a genius actor and I adore him to bits so I am sure he will be brilliant anyway. I’m just not all that keen on the artistic direction of his character… and what is with the “10/6″ in the hat!! That is a lazy ripoff of the Disney Hatter which ALSO read “10/6″ – book Hatter’s hat thingy reads “In this style 10/6″.

AHHHHH!

Right. Okay… so, well, if I get off my Alice high horse (which I know I SHOULD, at least before I see the movie) and stop nitpicking, I have to say it looks absolutely brilliant. It has quashed most of my doubts and I’m really, really excited about it. I can’t believe we have to wait till 2010 to see it when they’ve already finished filming! In the meantime, I shall keep obsessively waiting for more photos and information.