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Alice in Wonderland (2010)

140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW

The 2001 version of Planet of the Apes ensures that nothing else can ever be called Tim Burton’s worst movie, but this sure does its best…

Spoiler-free Movie Review of Alice in Wonderland:

Where do you want to start with this one? The 3D conversion, the disturbing art direction, the overdone cg, the serious tone, the efforts to turn this into an epic battle picture?

I’ve come up with a term for movies made post Lord of the Rings (LOTR) that needlessly and without good reason inject large-scale battle sequences with tons of CG combatants; such films are trying to win the LOTRy. I know, terrible joke – but I needed something to describe this rampant phenomenon. It’s really out of hand – movies are adding massive battles that are supposed to impress with their scope, when in actuality they just numb you with unreal looking scenes of seemingly endless armies of CG characters, which require you to care about none of them. It just ends up being an expensive and time consuming sequence with no actual importance to the picture. Worse yet, these scenes are usually supposed to be the climax of the film. Alice in Wonderland isn’t the worst example of this phenomenon, by far, but it may be the most inexcusable, since it is so completely out of place in this story.

The whole picture is an exercise in CG run amuck. Not only is virtually every character and location digitally realized – there’s not a single practical effect in sight – Burton uses CG to wildly distort even the human characters. I may never forgive the man for the gross enlargement of Helena Bonham Carter’s head. He even manages to make Crispin Glover look more creepy than usual, no small feat.

I simply cannot fathom what was going through the filmmaker’s heads when they decided on this art direction. It’s mental. Hideously ugly and intentionally bizarre, seemingly just for the sake of being “weird”. They also chose to give the characters full names, each more absurd than the one before. Even the cake has a name…

Depp is a nightmare. The character design is dreadful, the characterization more so, and the decision to make the Mad Hatter a main character is worst of all. Never hire stars before planning a script – you end up writing the role to the level of star appeal instead of the other way around. I get the idea of the mercury poisoning being the reason for his madness and that’s why he looks like that; it’s an interesting idea, but ultimately unnecessary. After all, everyone else in the world is mad, so why does he need a special story? And what’s with the whole Glaswegian accent?

The whole story of Alice returning to Underland is frankly a mess and unnecessarily complicated. The serious storyline of a fractured world torn apart by warring monarchs – ridiculous. Worse, it strips all of the fun from the thing. Shouldn’t a story set in this world be more enjoyable? The filmmakers envisioned this not as a reimagining and not as a sequel, but something else entirely. And it’s something else, alright…

But it’s not all bad, which is why this review is written more out of frustration than dislike. Mia Wasikowska is absolutely lovely and near perfect casting. She is very charismatic and works even with the parts of the story which pose her as a warrior, even if she’s frankly more interesting in London than in Underland.

The movie is at its best at the outset, when it places Alice against the backdrop of high society, where the people are even more bizarre than any creature she will encounter in the next 100 minutes. The nods to Wonderland characters depicted in London society is a great tip of the hat and gives the thing a Wizard of Oz dreamlike quality.

The other time that the movie really frustrates you by showing the potential is when they show some flashbacks to Alice’s previous visit as a child – this is the movie they should have made.

Finally, one spoiler-filled thought – what is up with the ending? I love that Alice has become a confident young woman not content with the life her society has carved out for her, but it’s ruined a bit when you realize that she has decided to head off to China as a colonial trader. That’s disturbing. Will the sequel find Alice exporting opium?

I find it extremely hard to believe that this is Burton’s most successful picture, which really only highlights the folly of judging movie success on dollars alone. These metrics should always have been based on ticket sales, not receipts, otherwise what’s the point? (In fact, adjusted for inflation, Batman was a much bigger success.)

Burton the great adapter is a bad role for someone so talented and creative. He has always been at his best with material he wrote or helped to develop. Alice in Wonderland is a supremely frustrating film and a missed opportunity. The only rousing success of the picture is the score by Danny Elfman, which is beautiful and haunting in that Elfman way.

Poster:

Trailer:

Bechdel Test:

Pass

The Representation Test Score: B (7 pts)

(http://therepresentationproject.org/grading-hollywood-the-representation-test/)

[schema type=”movie” url=”http://movies.disney.com/alice-in-wonderland-2010″ name=”Alice in Wonderland” description=”Nineteen-year-old Alice returns to the magical world from her childhood adventure, where she reunites with her old friends and learns of her true destiny: to end the Red Queen’s reign of terror.” director=”Tim Burton” actor_1=”Mia Wasikowska” actor_2=”Johnny Depp” actor_3=”Helena Bonham Carter” actor_4=”Anne Hathaway” actor_5=”Crispin Glover”]

Main Cast	Mia Wasikowska Alice Kingsleigh, Johnny Depp Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter Red Queen, Anne Hathaway White Queen
Rating	PG
Release Date	Fri 05 Mar 2010 UTC
Director	Tim Burton
Genres	Adventure, Family, Fantasy
Plot	Nineteen-year-old Alice returns to the magical world from her childhood adventure, where she reunites with her old friends and learns of her true destiny: to end the Red Queen’s reign of terror.
Poster
Runtime	108
Tagline	You’re invited to a very important date 3/5/10
Writers	Linda Woolverton (screenplay), Lewis Carroll (books)
Year	2010

August 8, 2014

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

140 Character Movie Review – #140RVW

I was surprised to read that this picture wasn’t successful critically or commercially, since I’ve always loved it & held it in high regard.

Spoiler-free Movie Review of Alice in Wonderland:

Lewis Carroll’s Alice stories are of endless fascination to audiences worldwide and so it is no surprise that they have been so often adapted for the stage and screen. Walt Disney of course adapted seemingly every known story in existence, and this very nearly became the first Disney animated feature after he had produced some Alice shorts in the late 1920’s. It was actually to have been a blend of live-action and animation, but rival studio Paramount rushed an Alice picture to market and Disney shelved the project. (It would not be the last time that the movie sat on the shelf…)

The movie took a long time to make and was Disney’s most expensive production to date. Reportedly it’s kind of a mess and an unsuccessful attempt to mix the work of multiple directors over a difficult adaptation. This is news to me, since I love the movie.

Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland is my favorite version of the tale (yes, including the book). That doesn’t mean it’s the best, of course, just that it’s the one I grew up with and most closely associate with Lewis Carroll’s tale. In fact, it certainly isn’t the greatest version, as it’s more of an abridgement than an adaptation. I’m sure Carroll scholars detest Disney’s treatment of this most wonderful work, but honestly I’ve never had my hair blown back by his style of “literary nonsense” and all the hidden theological and political meanings in his writing.

So it isn’t an insightful understanding of the complexities of Carroll’s work. Guess we’ll just have to settle for it being a really fun kids movie. Maybe the picture only gets a corner of the nonsense, whimsy and absurdity of the source novel – that’s still a healthy dose for an animated movie in 1951.

At 75 minutes, it’s a short picture, typical of the time. It’s a pretty packed film for such a short runtime. Alice in Wonderland contains more songs than any other Disney picture, something you don’t really notice because many of them are very brief. The picture also includes a number of elements from the second Alice novel, Through the Looking-Glass, including one of the highlights of the picture, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”.

The film certainly was the product of many cooks, with three directors, ten directing animators, and thirteen screenwriters, not including the early draft by Aldous Huxley! Lots of stuff got left in draft form or cut, leading you to believe that the movie could have easily been twice as long. If it was a success, maybe they would have adapted the sequel.

Alas, the film fared uncharacteristically poorly for a classic Disney feature. It wasn’t a flop but if it made back its budget it could only be on paper when you consider the true costs of the lengthy development time. Unlike other Disney pictures which were re-released every 6 or 7 years, Alice wasn’t put out again by the company until 1974, although an abbreviated version of the film was shown on tv periodically. Unofficially the film was screened at universities in the late 1960’s for reasons that should be immediately apparent, causing the company to actually recall some of the existing prints from.

I love the picture – I’ve always loved it. Not all of the music works and Walt was right – Alice herself isn’t a very likeable character. But it’s the right amount of madcap fun for kids. The art direction is marvelous, making for a gorgeous film with wonderful voice acting. Possibly tame now, it’s pretty subversive for 1951, and I’ve never met anyone who didn’t enjoy it.