Everybody keeps jabbering about the Jabberwocky monster in Disney’s 3-D reboot of Alice in Wonderland. But like many of the most excellent adventures, it’s the journey — not the destination smackdown between Alice and the evil serpent beast — that makes for a thoroughly engaging escapade.
Aided by especially strong work from costume designer Colleen Atwood, visual effects wizard Ken Ralston and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, director Tim Burton renders a lush dreamscape filled with scene-stealing freaks.
Alice holds her own in part because script writer Linda Woolverton ( The Lion King) rejiggered Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice and Through the Looking Glass texts, first animated by Disney in 1951, as a coming-of-age exercise in self-esteem. This plays better than it sounds: Introduced as a 19-year-old rebel pressured to marry a priggish twit, Alice, portrayed with pluck by first-timer Mia Wasikowska (pictured above), escapes from societal expectations by heading down the famous rabbit hole.
Burton can’t go wrong once the fantastical realm takes over. Converted to 3-D after being filmed with conventional cameras, Alice in Wonderland fails to match Avatar as an immersive experience, but the movie’s stereoscopic depth of field becomes mere icing on the storytelling cake when you’ve got angry-faced flowers, slobbering Bandersnatch beasts and supremely offbeat characters to work with.
The animated White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen), Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) and Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) prime the pump for live-action star turns.
Johnny Depp leads the charge as the fragile, intermittently merry Mad Hatter. Tossing mood swings and accent changes into the mix, Depp plays the unstable clown to Helena Bonham Carter‘s hilariously stern Red Queen. Resembling a kewpie doll tyrant, Carter tears into her “Off with their heads” catchphrase with surreal ferocity.
Matt Lucas, who plays eerie twins Tweedlee and Tweedledum through green-screen sleight of hand, provides effective comic relief, presenting the bickering tag-team brothers as if they were a vaudeville act from another planet. Anne Hathaway puts an odd spin on the White Queen, the Red Queen’s rival sister, by presenting her as a passive-aggressive phony who’s only pretending to be nice.
Alice, after being named the White Queen’s champion, learns her big life lesson as she heads into battle against the Jabberwocky, the Red Queen’s serpent/bat/dinosaur mutant.
Clocking in at 1 hour, 49 minutes, this briskly paced Wonderland downplays Burton’s darker cinematic proclivities seen in previous pictures like The Corpse Bride, Sleepy Hollow and 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Underscored by composer Danny Elfman‘s plush orchestrations, Alice treads an extravagantly visual path between waking dreams and comatose realities. At one point, she comforts Depp’s despondent Hatter with advice she’d once heard from her late father: “You’re entirely bonkers, but let me tell you a secret: All the best people are.”
Crafted with care and humor, the PG-rated Alice in Wonderland arrives in U.S. theaters March 5 as if it were a wish-you-were-here picture postcard sent from the richest region of the collective imagination.
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WIRED Plucky young heroine and juicy supporting characters populate fantastic-looking fantasy world of candy-colored castles, scary monsters and beguiling beasts.
TIRED What’s the deal with Anne Hathaway’s hypermannered White Queen?
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