a cornucopia of visual delights

Rating: 8/10 (24 March 2011)

Given his flair for the whimsical, the surrealistic, and the preposterous, Tim Burton would seem the ideal choice to direct a modern movie version of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." And turns out he is. (Terry Gilliam and Guillermo del Toro, whose "Pan's Labyrinth" was already a variant of sorts on the story, are two others who might have done as well).
Lewis Carroll's darkly humorous Victorian Era classic chronicles the adventures of a spunky, imaginative young girl who tumbles down a rabbit hole into a fantastic world of talking animals, size-altering potions, and memorably eccentric characters, a land ruled over by the evil, bulbous-headed Red Queen, played with petulant haughtiness by Helena Bonham Carter. The screenplay for the film – now called simply "Alice in Wonderland" - by Linda Woolverton draws from both "Wonderland" and its first sequel "Through the Looking Glass" (as most previous film versions have done), and captures both the darkness and the humor of the material.
All of Carroll's beloved creations are here, some played by actors in costumes and makeup, some generated entirely through CGI, and some – like The Red Queen – produced through a canny combination of the two. There's the mad Mad Hatter (played by a typically loopy Johnny Depp), the growling Bandersnatch, the slyly smiling Cheshire Cat, the virtuous White Queen (Anne Hathaway), the roly-poly twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and the dragon-like Jabberwocky, which it has been prophesied Alice will slay, thereby liberating the people of the kingdom from their tyrannical queen.
Burton breathes new life into this oft-told and oft-filmed tale thanks to a team of visual and special effects wizards who come as close to capturing the world of Carroll's imagination as any group of filmmakers could ever be expected to, given the enormity of the challenge.
As the heroine who must learn to accept the impossible before she can know who she truly is, Mia Wasikowska manages to keep Alice life-sized and appealing even in the midst of all the larger-than-life pyrotechnics going on around her.
A masterpiece of art direction, costume design and special effects, this "Alice in Wonderland" is the next best thing to the books themselves.