Blog News

1. Comments are still disabled though I am thinking of enabling them again.

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Monday, 22 June 2009

Well I thought I knew the book.

I've been following the news of the forthcoming Tim Burton Alice In Wonderland movie with the interest that you would expect.
The Internet Movie Database has an extensive cast list, and it worries me for a number of reasons. I'm not too concerned that it includes The Jabberwock and Tweedledee and Tweedledum, characters from Through The Looking Glass, as most of the other screen versions have also used them. Just too iconic to miss out, I suppose. I am concerned that they (the Tweedles, that is) are, according to the cast list, performed by Matt Lucas who has never done anything at all that I can stand. Maybe his just voicing the digital images won't be so bad.
They aren't the only Looking Glass characters either. The cast list also includes the Red Queen and the White Queen, though neither the King nor Queen of Hearts. Clearly this one isn't going to be terribly faithful to the book.

Slightly more concerning is that I know the books probably as well as anyone you will ever encounter. If I were on Mastermind with Alice as my specialist subject, you wouldn't be seeing many passes. So why, out of forty characters listed are there no fewer than twenty-eight that I have never heard of, twenty-eight that are simply not in the book at all?

Makes you wonder just where Burton will be going with it, doesn't it.

With all that said I love this conceptual art.

4 comments:

goofy said...

I think it's a mistake to judge movie by comparing them to the books they're supposed to be based on.

goofy said...

"I know the books probably as well as anyone you will ever encounter."

I couldn't deny that, even if I tried with both hands.

Bob Hale said...

I think so too. My two favourite movie versions are the Jonathan Miller and the Jan Svankmajer and they hardly resemble the book at all.
Nevertheless I've waited my whole life for a version that does resemble the books. The closest by far to date is the Irwin Allen production.
I'm sure the Tim Burton will be great (Matt Lucas notwithstanding) but it won't be the movie that I want to see.

goofy said...

see more awesome photos here
http://www.thestar.com/fpLarge/photo/655986