Alice in Wonderland

How do you bring a book to life? How does a fig­ure dreamt up on a page become embod­ied by a flesh-and-blood person?

Any­one tasked with adapt­ing a much-loved work to the big screen must face these prob­lems – and it is pre­cise­ly the mys­te­ri­ous process­es of meta­mor­pho­sis, ado­les­cence and adap­ta­tion itself that are explic­it­ly addressed by Tim Burton’s Alice in Won­der­land, as his ​‘wrong Alice’ grad­u­al­ly becomes both the Alice in Won­der­land that we know and love and also – para­dox­i­cal­ly – her own person.

The result is a film both famil­iar, and inven­tive­ly dif­fer­ent, from Lewis Carroll’s nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry fan­ta­sy nov­els for chil­dren, not to men­tion John Tenniel’s accom­pa­ny­ing illus­tra­tions. Adap­ta­tion is not just the medi­um, but a cen­tral theme, as one Alice, half-guid­ed by a book and a vision, is trans­formed into another.

At age four, Alice Kings­ley was vis­it­ed each night by the same recur­ring dream of adven­tures in Won­der­land. Now aged 19, Alice (Mia Wasikows­ka) is still filled with the imag­i­na­tive­ness and inde­pen­dence of mind that her late father had always encour­aged in her, but finds her­self being increas­ing­ly strait­ened and corset­ed by those around her.

Under immense pres­sure to accept a mar­riage pro­pos­al from a pompous fool, Alice falls down a rab­bit-hole and arrives, ​‘ter­ri­bly late’, in a place that merges her own pecu­liar world with Carroll’s.

Here, too, Alice is repeat­ed­ly con­front­ed with not being her­self, and pres­sured to become some­one else, as the strange local denizens argue as to whether this is the same Alice who vis­it­ed them before, or indeed the cham­pi­on who will defeat the Jab­ber­wock, as fore­told in the ​‘Orac­u­lum’ (an illus­trat­ed text remark­ably like one of Carroll’s).

As Alice faces cru­cial deci­sions about who she is, what she wants and where she belongs, and as she regains her ​‘much-ness’, she becomes, like her father before her, a deter­mined pur­suer of impos­si­ble dreams – in an all-too-real world.

If the inhab­i­tants of Carroll’s Won­der­land were all just ​‘a pack of cards’, then screen­writer Lin­da (The Lion King) Woolver­ton has rad­i­cal­ly reshuf­fled the deck, so that now, no mat­ter how recog­nis­able the faces remain, the game is not the same.

This is Carroll’s two Alice books reordered and new­ly psy­chol­o­gised – ​‘it’s all about you, you know’, as Alice is told by the Hat­ter (John­ny Depp) – and frag­ments of Alice’s per­son­al­i­ty can be seen dis­persed through­out the Won­der­land per­son­nel, includ­ing her chief antag­o­nist, the decap­i­ta­tion-hap­py Red Queen (cum Queen of Hearts), played with show-stop­ping petu­lance by Hele­na Bon­ham Carter.

Both the Hat­ter and the White Queen (Anne Hath­away) are far more promi­nent here than they ever were in Carroll’s nov­els – although they remain con­spic­u­ous­ly under­de­vel­oped as char­ac­ters, with Depp in par­tic­u­lar hav­ing to work over­time with his zany tics and (oh yes) crazy dance moves to fill in for the Hatter’s lack of substance.

Still, Bur­ton has always been a visu­al sto­ry­teller, and the exu­ber­ant images on offer here, com­bin­ing CG and real-life actors (some­times in one char­ac­ter) and ren­dered in absolute­ly stun­ning 3D, are a source of gen­uine won­der, and will no doubt inform the way a whole new gen­er­a­tion pic­tures Carrol’s curi­ous world. Oh, and it is also very, very funny.