Why Is A Raven Like A Writing Desk ?

Rating: 6/10 (1 February 2013)

Alice Kingsleigh is invited to a lavish engagement party but flees and falls down a hole into a strange dream world filled with talking animals, strange potions and crazy goings-on. It transpires she has been chosen to defeat the wicked Red Queen and her terrifying champion, the Jabberwocky ...
This lavish Disney reworking of Lewis Carroll's classic children's fable is great fun, visually splendid from start to finish and almost tops their classic 1951 animated version. The reason it doesn't is that, like Gavin Millar's excellent 1985 film Dreamchild, it's not a straight adaptation; instead, it's an amalgam of the two novels, bookended with a costume Victorian back story, flashbacks to the original adventure and the plot of the classic poem Jabberwocky (which appears in Through The Looking-Glass but is otherwise unrelated) mixed in. Linda Woolverton's script is pretty good though; it must be hard to take a story which is completely loopy to begin with and shape it into a coherent mainstream movie. What it does well is presenting Alice as an intelligent and free-spirited young woman in the midst of all the madness - she initially dismisses Underland as fantasy but gradually comes to respect it and love the people, and Wasikowska's performance really brings out this quality. Carroll's stories can be taken many ways - coming of age drama, drug-addled hallucinations, absurdist social satire - and Burton's style manages to encapsulate most of them well. Even better, it's just terrific to look at and listen to from start to finish. From the Red Queen's enormous head to the Mad Hatter's goofy green eyes to the Cheshire Cat's lazy grin, all the visual elements are arresting, and accompanied by a great Danny Elfman booming score, full of his trademark woodwind trickery, blatting brass and hurdy-gurdy melodies. The scale work alone (Alice is frequently either much too big or small) is breathtaking, and the big battle with the Jabberwocky (voiced by the inimitable Lee) is a grandiose and exciting highlight. All of the actors are great - I particularly like Glover as the slimy Knave of Hearts - but the voice cast steal it, especially Windsor as the not-so-sleepy Dormouse and Fry's honeydripped vanishing feline tones. Occasionally the movie comes across as a sort of Disney version of a Harry Potter film, with a few incoherent moments, and in some senses Depp has been playing The Mad Hatter in other pictures for years now, but there are plenty of great scenes and the realisation of the fantasy is first rate. Featuring outstanding visual effects throughout by Ken Ralston, this is a great spectacular fantasy of a timeless imaginative story.