Movie: Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010)
That was fun! I had seen Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Dark Shadows before. Those aren't films that will encourage you to explore a director's further work. Alice in Wonderland is far from great, but it contains enough to convince you that Burton may well deserve his 90's reputation. The film has a genuinely wacky spirit that feels sincere rather than carefully calculated. It is full of throwaway dialogues, jokes and images that make no sense at all within the context of the plot, and merely follow their own dream logic. It's impossible to dislike a film where an evil queen with a disproportionately large head is playing croquet, using a flamingo as a stick and a hedgehog as a ball.
I wrote about my distaste for whimsical fantasy just a couple of entries earlier when discussing The Wizard of Oz, and never realised that 'Alice' doesn't even belong to the same genre. So I was quite taken aback to find that in White Rabbit, Grace Slick barely uses any imagery from her own drugs experiences. Almost all of the lyrics are directly taken from Lewis Carroll, including the hookah smoking caterpillar and the pills that make you larger and smaller. The sheer quantity of absurd imagery and characters I completely did not expect to see, explains to a large extent my affection for the film, but Burton also deserves credit for doing interesting things with them. The scene in which Alice (Mia Wasikowska) meets the Hatter (Johnny Depp) is a wonderful example. The revelation of the height difference between Alice and the Hatter is surprising and funny; on her journey, Alice was accompanied by a dog whose size seemed to be in normal proportion to an ordinary teenage girl.
The film has much of the same CGI problems as many other contemporary blockbusters, something that's especially noticeable after just seeing The Wizard of Oz. The 'analogue' backgrounds, costumes and locations there all have a much more distinct and specific look than the digital ones in Alice in Wonderland. We visit many different locations, but they all look kinda same-ish. Alice in Wonderland was made just after the success of The Dark Knight made everyone want to 'darken' familiar stories. Burton here gives the impression to do the same thing through the grey tones of the CGI and the somewhat foreboding musical score, but this is constantly undercut by the goofy and proudly ridiculous tone of the rest of the film. Even the final fight between Alice and the Jabberwocky feels more like lighthearted fun than the fulfilling of an epic prophecy. It helps that Mia Wasikowska is very sympathetic and that Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway all act as if they've come straight from the set of The Looney Tunes.
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