She currently holds dominion over the land and guards the sought after weapon with her vicious Bandersnatch (some sort of hairy, toothy creature). Of course the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) isn’t pleased with this prospect. Bumping into the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), Alice soon discovers that her coming has been foretold as the one who will bring peace back to the land by slaying the Red Queen’s fearful Jabberwocky (a huge flying dragon) with the coveted Vorpal sword and restore power to the White Queen (Anne Hathaway). However, Wonderland isn’t quite the slaphappy place it once was. Moments later, she’s down the rabbit hole and in a world she is certain she has visited in recurring dreams from her childhood. Obliged to accept the public proposal of a suitor she doesn’t care for, she instead runs away from the crowd and follows a strange rabbit wearing a waistcoat. Under the direction of Tim Burton, little Alice has matured into a young lady (Mia Wasikowska) living in Victorian England. Unfortunately, it just made my head spin.) She's constantly throwing tantrums, and she's totally insecure because her parents gave the crown to her younger sister with the tiny head.If you were one of the many left bemused and confused by Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland from 1951, the first thing you’ll be happy to know about this 2010 live-action/animated hybrid version is the existence of a real story! (If, on the other hand, you did find meaning in that “mad” production, then my hat’s off to you. She lives in an 'it's-all-about-me' world. She has the emotional growth level of a 2-year-old. It was quite flattering."Ĭarter also said about the character, "I guess that's how Tim sees me. He then produced this drawing of a woman with a big head and angry eyebrows. "But this time, after he asked me, he told me I had to be in it because he already drew me in the part. "I'm always touched when he wants to work with me again," she said. Helena Bonham Carter's psychotic Red Queen is a character mash-up of the "off with her head!"-squawking, croquet-playing Queen of Hearts from Carroll's book, who is the chief villain in the Disney version, and the Red Queen, a live chess piece that squares off against the White Queen in Carroll's 1871 sequel Through the Looking-Glass.Ĭarter, who was still Burton's real-life longtime partner at the time (they broke up in 2013), told the Orange County Register that, though she had worked with him five times beforehand, she remained pleasantly surprised to be offered the role. I wanted to make her into a character I could identify with: quiet, internal, not comfortable in her own skin, not quite knowing how to deal with things, being both young and having an old soul." "I've always hated Alice on screen," Burton told The Guardian regarding his feelings about the titular heroine before he had a version to call his own. "I wore a corset for the red dress and the blue dress at the very beginning of the film, and they were very painful, but I only realize now, having done Jane Eyre, that they were such sissy corsets." "I did about five auditions for Alice before I got the role," the Polish-Australian actress told W in 2011. The following year she gave a critically acclaimed performance as the title heroine in the latest movie adaptation of Jane Eyre. Mia Wasikowska, whose breakthrough in America came playing a self-harming young gymnast on HBO's In Treatment, won the role of Alice over some more established names ( Amanda Seyfried was also said to be high on Burton's list). Nevertheless, audiences found Alice's level of muchness perfectly up to snuff, and the film made over a billion dollars worldwide. That's how it popped out of Lewis Carroll's head when he wrote the story 155 years ago.īut Burton, naturally, put his signature stamp on the part-live-action, part-CGI'd-to-the-nines film, an eye-popping confection that directly employs more of the humor-tinged terror found in Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland than the animated Disney film that came out in 1951 (though, really, the cartoon has its terrifying moments, too), as well as characters from his 1871 follow-up, Through the Looking-Glass (many of whom returned for the 2016 sequel directed by James Bobin).īurton got the merry band from his 2007 adaptation of Sweeney Todd back together for Alice, namely Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar and Timothy Spall as Bayard (the pet dog of Crispin Glover's Knave of Hearts, inspired by the Puppy mentioned in the Carroll tale), as well as costume designer Colleen Atwood, and ended up with a visual feast-if not exactly a well-balanced meal, as far as most critics were concerned. Alice in Wonderland didn't need Tim Burton to turn the story into a bonkers trip down the rabbit hole.
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