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Six-year-old Alice recounts her recurring nightmare to her beloved father and asks, "Do you think I've gone 'round the bend?" Not to worry, he soothes. All the best people are bonkers.
"Alice in Wonderland" director Tim Burton is brilliantly bonkers and delightfully demented when it comes to movies. Witness "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "Corpse Bride," "Edward Scissorhands" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas."
Here, Burton sends audiences down the famous rabbit hole into a dizzying 3-D universe (if possible, pay the extra couple of bucks to see it that way), a female empowerment story, a film reminiscent of "The Wizard of Oz" and a sophisticated take on "Alice" that art students could spend a year dissecting.
A semester alone could be devoted to the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the many variations on hearts that appear on her body -- face, lipstick, bulbous head -- clothing, castle, court subjects, topiary-studded gardens, croquet course, frog footmen and clothed monkeys.
The story opens with Alice as a girl and quickly advances to a time when she is 19 (now played by Mia Wasikowska). Her father has died and her mother has little tolerance for Alice's flights of fancy. She has brought her to a party that, if all goes as schemed, will celebrate Alice's engagement to a titled dullard.
Before she can accept or reject his public proposal, Alice begs for a moment, follows a rabbit skittering around and falls down the rabbit hole into Underland.
There, the touchstones familiar from the Lewis Carroll books -- a potion labeled "Drink Me" that shrinks Alice, a cake marked "Eat Me" that causes a growth spurt of Olympian proportions -- appear along with a cast of characters not just colorful but nearly psychedelic.
In addition to Tweedledee and Tweedledum, the White Rabbit, Dormouse, Blue Caterpillar smoking a hookah and Cheshire Cat, Alice encounters warring sisters, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and Red Queen.
- Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter.
- Rating: PG for fantasy action violence involving scary images and situations, and for a smoking caterpillar.
- Web site: disney.go.com/AliceinWonderland
And, as in the "Wizard of Oz," there is the endearing character she will miss most of all: the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), with startled orange hair and eyebrows and oversize, green and glowing eyes. Lady Gaga has nothing on him although his look is a nod to the mercury poisoning that commonly affected hat makers of the day due to tainted glue.
Alice navigates a series of tests, trials, mad monarchs and horrid creatures. Among them are the snarling dog-like Bandersnatch, which claws at her arm and leaves his scratchy mark, and the Jabberwocky, a hissing, red-eyed, winged beast.
The underworld is a fun-house mirror image of life above ground, and Alice must decide if she's dreaming and if she can forge her own path instead of being told what to do and who to be. In other words, she must grow up.
The movie is based on the books "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," spun into a screenplay by Linda Woolverton. An author of young adult novels, she wrote or co-wrote the scripts for "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King."
To make his world come alive, Burton uses green screens, computer-generated characters with famous voices and actors whose images are manipulated, as with Crispin Glover.
He plays the leader of the Red Queen's Army and sports a facial scar and heart-shaped patch over one eye. Mr. Glover's head was placed atop a computer-generated body that stood 71/2 feet tall; on the set, he wore stilts so characters could interact with him.
It's all wildly imaginative but often very serious stuff and not suitable for preschoolers. Other than some quirks of the Red Queen -- who uses a pig as an ottoman and declares, "I love a warm pig belly for my aching feet" -- there's not much humor to be had.
It suffers from the same affliction leveled at the vastly different 1951 movie of the same name. Leonard Maltin, in his book "The Disney Films," writes that the cartoon "is a very flashy and generally entertaining film but ... it lacks warmth." An afterglow.
I felt the same about this version, perhaps due to the darkness of Burton's vision, the choice of Ms. Wasikowska as Alice and the distracting, disturbing Depp makeup.
A wonder to behold, just not a wonderland I need to revisit.
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