Wonderland: A 3-in-1 Review

Warning: May contain spoilers

Three reviews for the price of one.

The 3D

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is the first of the new generation of 3D movies that I've seen and I decided to see it to its best advantage at the local IMAX cinema. Now I know that the live action was shot in 2D and then digitally enhanced to match the full digital rendering of the animated world in which it takes place. What I don't know is whether this accounts for the failings of the presentation. Some bits of the 3D are stunning. The panoramic shots as we race through or soar over Wonderland are terrific and some of the set pieces - falling down the hole, battling the Jabberwocky - are extremely well done. The trouble is that when it's good it's very, very good but when it's bad it's terrible. There are two major things and one minor thing wrong. The minor thing was completely predictable. Time after time action takes place into or out of the screen which would be easier to follow and dramatically better across the screen. It's the use of 3D just because it's there. The other problems are more basic and relate to the actual technique. The digital rendering of the live shots frequently leaves the actual actors looking like 2D figures in a 3D background, where there are multiple depths of action the overall effect is akin to the cardboard cutout Alice puppet theatre that I have in my collection. The final problem, also especially noticeable in the bookend "real world" sections, is that part of the process has been to sharpen the focus of the bit of screen you are supposed to be looking at and blur the focus in any other plane so that you get a foreground of out-of-focus bushes, a hyper-sharp middleground of two people talking and another out-of-focus background of fuzzy, unidentifiable figures. Flickering your eyes to another part of the screen is like looking through a frosted glass window.
So overall, while sections of the 3D are stunning, I can't help thinking it will be better when I get to watch it in good old flat screen 2D.

The film

But is it a good film? Well I will say this, it's quite remarkable how one man's virtue is another vice. Tim Burton has been doing the interview round promoting the film and has said, over and over, that all the previous versions suffer from a lack of narrative, that Alice wanders from one random encounter to the next without any rhyme or reason. He, of course has "put this right" by adding a narrative base to the story. He might actually have got away with it too if the narrative he'd chosen wasn't so familiar and trite that cliché is too inadequate a word. It's a standard good versus evil story with a climactic battle that could just as easily be from Narnia as Wonderland. Bolting on a narrative could only ever have worked if it was something as unusual and quirky as Wonderland itself.
It isn't all bad news though. Against all my expectations everyone puts in a good performance - even Matt Lucas as the Tweedles. The wealth of excellent characterisations culminates in Johnny Depp's brilliantly bonkers Mad Hatter - a character full of wild madness but with moments of great pathos. The ensemble as a whole almost manages to save the film from the weight of it's dull plot and the screenplay's ponderous "be true to yourself" moralising.
Almost but not quite.

The adaptation of the book

It is of course, as Burton keeps endlessly pointing out, not an adaptation of the book. It uses elements of the book to create a sequel of sorts, albeit a sequel to a version of the book that doesn't actually exist. In some respects it is truly excellent. Visually it may be dark but it's certainly in tune with my vision of Lewis Carroll's world. The characters are deliberately not based on previous renderings, showing instead all of the trademark Burton quirkiness which is completely suitable. I loved the look of the film. The problem is that while Burton is good at psychotic quirkiness he doesn't here pull off the whimsy that is required for Carroll. The use of a kind of gibberish German to name Wonderland items - upelkuchen for the cake that makes you grow, fairfarren for "safe journey" and so on - is contrived rather than whimsical. The humour is unforgivably clunky and Carroll's devious and cunning wordplay is entirely absent. Considered as an adaptation it misses the point by a country mile.

So the overall verdict isn't all that favourable. The movie has its good points but the bad points more than balance them out. I enjoyed it but not a much as I should have. The definitive version of Alice still remains to be made.

One last thing

Dear Mister Burton, can you tell Linda Woolverton, the screenwriter, that it's not "borogroves", it's "borogoves".

Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland

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.

Eat Me!

I'm expecting my Alice in Wonderland collection to grow as rapidly as Alice herself in the near future. It's always a side effect of a new film about a popular character that there are large amounts of promotional material, magazine articles and such about it. The first that I have seen in printed form (as opposed to on the internet) for Tim Burton's forthcoming Alice movie is in this month's Fantastique. The article itself is reasonably interesting (without telling me very much that I didn't know already) and does contain printed versions of the publicity shots that were released from the production, including Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter on the cover. It's always nice to have stuff on nice glossy paper rather than just on the computer screen.
Anyway, the other thing that happens in these circumstances is that lots of other material becomes available, or becomes avaialable again. I've seen quite a few versions of the book that I already have reappear in the bookshops recently as well as a brand new version illustrated by Robert Ingpen which has some truly magnificent pencil and pastel artwork and, unlike many illustrated editions, has it in an abundance that would fill a gallery with some left over for the advertising posters.
I also picked up for a pound a DVD of an animated version I had never heard of. It's a very modern computer animated version from BKN which clocks in at 48 minutes. Like quite a lot of the cheaper versions it bears only a minimal resemblance to the Lewis Carroll originla and its simplistic computer animation has the look of a personal project about it. I can't complain for a pound, I suppose, though it's not a version destined to become a classic.

The Burton film isn't due until next March so I'm expecting a lot more stuff to become available soon, probably around Christmas. I suppose I ought to start allocating funds to collecting it all now.

Alice in Wonderland. Again?

And it seems, if this report is to be believed, to be some kind of sequel.

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.