She, predictably, follows him down the rabbit hole, both literally and metaphorically. On the day she's proposed to by a stuffy rube, the White Rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) visits Alice. (There's much more to be written about Burton's recent Anglophile phase, at least partially inspired by his partnership, both creatively and romantically, with Brit Helena Bonham Carter, who here plays the wicked, balloon-headed Red Queen.) Owing more, structurally, to Steven Spielberg's odiously autobiographical 'Hook' than anyone (myself included) would care to admit, this 'Alice' sees our young heroine (played by Mia Wasikowska) all grown up and living a chaste lifestyle in Victorian England. ("Off with his head!" they'll undoubtedly cry.)
In the face of many naysayers, I might add. So, is 'Alice in Wonderland,' spruced up with cutting edge visual effects and given the baroque Tim Burton treatment, a success creatively? I say yes. Well, they did rush it to home video, but after it had amassed more than a billion dollars worldwide ($400 million in North America alone – yowza) and entered the record books as one of the most successful movies of all time.
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(This new movie is a Disney production, and they did a lot to make the connection explicitly clear.) There were rumors that, before its release, Disney was so worried about this new 'Alice' that they were going to dump it in theaters and then rush it to home video. (Gone are the days of gonzo original conceits like ' Edward Scissorhands,' ' Beetlejuice' or even his greatest filmmaking accomplishment, the humane and hilarious 'Ed Wood.' Again: I remain a dedicated Tim Burton fanatic, through thick and thin.)Īll of this is an incredibly long-winded introduction to his manic take on Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' stories that also serves as a jazzed-up, 3-D revision of the beloved Walt Disney animated film. But sometimes you get ' Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,' a precious confection that was long on style and, well, just plain long. Sometimes these experiments in Tim Burton-izing are runaway successes, like his adaptation of stage mainstay ' Sweeney Todd,' which was a lyrical, bloodthirsty masterpiece. It's just that watching a Tim Burton film has now become a kind of guessing game, as to whether or not his particular distinctions and proclivities mesh or clash with the material he's been hired to adapt. And Tim Burton takes his job very seriously. He's become a filmmaker who is now hired to graft the "Tim Burton look" (which he has carefully cultivated throughout his 30+ year career) to some pre-existing property or conceit, say, ' Planet of the Apes' or ' Sleepy Hollow.' So instead of a director defined by the typical stylistic conventions (his editorial rhythm maybe or camera angles and movements) it's more about the look and whether that look has been properly affixed to the material.Īgain, this may sound like some kind of dig, but it isn't meant to be. As I was walking through the MoMA exhibit dedicated to the works of director Tim Burton, it became abundantly clear that, as a director, there's very little to his work beyond its look.
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