Tim Burton's visual genius and Linda Woolverton's inspired writing bring Alice to a coming-of-age as innovative and exciting as Lewis Carroll's original, avoiding the temptation to insipidness, exploiting the story's weirdness. Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter promises more startling genius, characteristic of his previous work with Burton.
There have been films based on the story of Alice since 1902, and a previous product from Disney in 1951. That insipid version disappointingly bore strong visual resemblance to a string of other Disney versions of children's classics in the 1950s and 1960s, such as
- Lady and the Tramp 1955
- Sleeping Beauty 1959
- One Hundred and One Dalmatians 1961
It famously fell among five different directors whose sections were alleged to be more in competition with each other than vying for the audience’s praise. It certainly did not convey the visual or atmospheric weirdness of the original.
Aspects of Alice
Reworked rather than faithfully reproduced, this children's classic regularly engages the popular imagination through a range of media re-productions, of which puppetry in the European tradition captures its idiosyncrasy and subversiveness.
The TaFantastika, a dark light theatre company from Prague, performs Aspects of Alice with a mixture of puppetry and animation, sound and visual effects, light and dark with large screen and magic-lantern together. A classic black theatre performance based on the motifs of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, written and directed by Petr Kratochvíl.
This adaptation, which has entertained audiences in over thirty countries for twenty years, uses Carroll's motifs as a vehicle that explores Alice's journey into adulthood in parallel with the development of the Czech Republic.
Burton Reimagines the Weirdness
Burton never enjoyed previous versions of Alice: "It's a funny project. The story is obviously a classic with iconic images and ideas and thoughts, but with all the movie versions, well, I've just never seen one that really had any impact to me. It's always just a series of weird events. Every character is strange and she's just kind of wandering through all of the encounters as just a sort of observer." Burton told Geoff Boucher at Los Angeles Times.
Burton’s new version, also released by Disney, promises to exploit twenty first century technology to the full. The movie utilises live actors, CGI, and motion capture technology, and will be shown in 3D and on IMAX.
As James Cameron’s award-winning Avatar (2009) demonstrates, this is a successful mix of techniques which constitute the cinema industry’s latest ploy to position itself separately from television and tempt audiences in front of the large screen.
Unique Aspects of Burton’s Alice
The film is released in Australia first, March 4th rather than 5th globally, honouring its Australian star, Mia Wasikowska, a formula which also worked well for Avatar.
Screenwriter Linda Woolverton is rare as a woman reworking the original, since far more often it is male writers who become obsessed with this story and its characters and situations. Her impressive previous screenplay credits include
- Beauty and the Beast 1991
- The Lion King 1994
Woolverton tells the original Alice stories as flashbacks experienced by this now almost grown up heroine. Alice needs to escape from marriage into the Ascot family – her shock proposal, from which she runs, takes place at the royal race meeting.
View Virtual Original Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1865)
The British library public catalogue, among other websites, displays a virtual copy of the original, handwritten and illustrated by Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures Under Ground (1865). The program requires you to download a specialist screen for viewing this text, then provides a variety of tools with which to magnify it, or access audio or typescript versions of the page that you are viewing.
Perusing the book reveals that Carroll’s original drawings appear to have been faithfully reproduced and enhanced by John Tenniel in the larger, more full version Alice in Wonderland. For weirdness of imagery, check out page eleven, where the elongated Alice certainly appears, "Curiouser and curiouser! Now I'm opening out like the largest telescope there ever was!"
This original demonstrates how visual was the author’s imagination, being also a renowned pioneer and explorer of the artistic possibilities of the then relatively new photographic technology.
Burton Originals Revisited at MoMa Exhibition
Burton’s exhibition at the MoMa in New York attests to this director’s equally visual imagination, as though the list of credits including Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice did not already. Perhaps this will prove the definitive cinematic reworking of Alice?
Sources
Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2008
Lewis Carroll (1865) Alice's Adventures Under Ground British Library
TaFantastika Black Light Theatre
Valerie Williamson - Dr. Val Williamson is a freelance journalist and academic specialising in historical and popular culture topics.
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