Obviously I haven't seen the film yet - it doesn't open here until next Friday - but yesterday I read the novelisation. I hope the film is better. The story is slight and uninvolving and the writing hasty and uncomplicated. Worse though is that nothing at all remains of the kind of Carrollian word-play that is so important to Alice. So they have their own secret language , some of which is vaguely decipherable as relating to real words, usually real German words, but so what? Crucially it isn't actually funny. Upelkuchen is a cake to make you grow? Oh, my aching sides.
Of course the point of the film is probably the visuals - they are usually the important element of a Burton movie - but a better story would seem, at this stage, to have been more promising.
One other gripe, and it's one that I have used before when referring to Disney publications of Alice related materials. You will find it a hard search to locate Lewis Carroll's name anywhere in the book. It's there, but only right down at the bottom of that microscopic list of film credits at the bottom of the back cover, so small that I can't actually read it without a magnifying glass. Otherwise the Novel is "Disney's Alice In Wonderland by T.T. Sutherland based on Linda Woolverton's Screenplay for the Tim Burton film".And it's similarly obscure in the Dorling-Kindersley Visual Guide to the film where you will locate it it in tiny print on the credits page, this book being "Disney's Alice In Wonderland written by Jo Casey and Laura Gilbert".
I find this relegation to such a lowly position of the person without whom none it would exist to be rather shameful.
Of course the point of the film is probably the visuals - they are usually the important element of a Burton movie - but a better story would seem, at this stage, to have been more promising.
One other gripe, and it's one that I have used before when referring to Disney publications of Alice related materials. You will find it a hard search to locate Lewis Carroll's name anywhere in the book. It's there, but only right down at the bottom of that microscopic list of film credits at the bottom of the back cover, so small that I can't actually read it without a magnifying glass. Otherwise the Novel is "Disney's Alice In Wonderland by T.T. Sutherland based on Linda Woolverton's Screenplay for the Tim Burton film".And it's similarly obscure in the Dorling-Kindersley Visual Guide to the film where you will locate it it in tiny print on the credits page, this book being "Disney's Alice In Wonderland written by Jo Casey and Laura Gilbert".
I find this relegation to such a lowly position of the person without whom none it would exist to be rather shameful.
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