Word: filming
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...industry rancor. When Disney, its distributor, announced that the picture would be released on DVD only three months after its opening in movie houses instead of the usual four, the bosses of British theater chains balked, declaring they would not show Alice. A compromise was reached, and the film is now playing throughout the U.K. (Read a review of Burton's Alice in Wonderland at Techland.com...
Some actors lend their voices to CGI characters: Alan Rickman to the Caterpillar, Stephen Fry to the Cheshire Cat, the 92-year-old Gough (in his fifth Burton film) as the Dodo Bird. Other stars appear in fanciful makeup. Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter matches his flaming red hair with red eyeliner, as if he'd been crying for years; he's a gentleman ghoul out of Johnny Weir's closet. Anne Hathaway, as the White Queen, is given crimson lips, platinum hair and, alas, no redeeming quirks. Bonham Carter (Burton's partner offscreen) sports blue eye shadow that could...
...poem "Jabberwocky." Alice must seize the vorpal sword and slay the fearsome Jabberwock. In assuming this challenge, she becomes a female Frodo, Wonderland's Joan of Arc. This twist legitimizes the feature-length running time but also risks turning this jovially anarchic enterprise into your standard action-adventure. The film is better at reveling in eccentricity than at replaying Excalibur. (See the top 10 movie performances...
...other change was Alice's age. In the book she is "seven-and-a-half, exactly"; here she's 19 and meant to wed a pruny nobleman. It's not a crime for a film to turn a girl into a young lady: Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz was 16, about twice the age of the book's Dorothy. And upping Alice's age removes the whisper of pedophilia that the 20th century applied to the love that Charles Dodgson, the Oxford math professor who was the real Lewis Carroll, lavished on the real Alice Liddell...
...movie Alice is also stricken by her beloved father's death - as Dodgson said he had been. So the movie is in a way an autobiography of each man-child responsible for it: Carroll and Burton. That may not matter to the kids who find this film much livelier than earlier versions and easier to warm to than the original. And is Burton's vision trippy enough to serve as a hallucinogenic blast? Go ask Alice...