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Burton Returns: Alice in Wonderland

Written by Adam Ezagouri
Saturday, 06 March 2010 00:00

This month, Tim Burton is back with his new off-beat creation Alice in Wonderland, which will star Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and newcomer Mia Wasikowska.

One only has to look at director Tim Burton’s track-record to find a most unconventional pattern: superheroes, fairy tales, bio-exorcists, Martians, apes, Pee-Wee Herman… One thing is sure, Burton is not one to have his feet firmly on the ground, and in a world where Sandra Bullock is Oscar-nominated, who could blame him?

This time, cinema’s favourite Wizard of Weird leaves the real world for Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland in a new adaptation of the classic story. Alice in Wonderland will see an older Alice return to her quirky fantasy land and catch up with some familiar faces. Burton regulars Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are at the rendez-vous and given appropriately wacky roles.

As surreal as Alice in Wonderland is, this strangely feels like a safe choice for Tim Burton who already gave us his own take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory back in 2005. A gradual but very real change has affected Burton’s repertoire over the years. His early films being infinitely more inventive and manic than later works which, though still bursting with imagination, very often are adaptation of popular novels or stories. Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, Big Fish and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, to name a few, were all projects linked to an already established structure, to an already conceived idea. And although the director rarely stays too close to the source material, there is still a feeling of déjà vu in his later projects which just wasn’t there in the early days of his filmmaking career.

Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, the feature that started it all, may have had a popular character at its heart in the shape of Paul Reubens’ Pee-Wee Herman but the film was very much Burton’s: fresh, new, visually inventive, darkly funny, with a unique off-beat quality which would become the director’s trademark style. Cult black comedy Beetlejuice looked at the afterlife in a way never before seen and gave Michael Keaton his best role to date. Burton then tackled the Batman films and, although based on a classic series of DC comic books, he did the blockbusters his way, and Batman Returns in particular felt more like a silent gothic fairy-tale than a superhero movie. Edward Scissorhands then brought a welcome burst of heart in a modern fairy-tale which no-one expected and which gave Johnny Depp his first weirdo Burton role. Ed Wood and Mars Attacks! tackled the world of 50’s B-movies with the former looking at the life of famously rubbish but determined filmmaker Edward D. Wood Jr (and his relationship with then Dracula star Bela Lugosi) and the latter turning a series of trading cards into a hilariously wacky alien invasion sci-fi film which boasted an all-star cast and Sarah Jessica Parker’s on a chihuahua’s body.

And now we have Alice in Wonderland, a story which is far from being a newcomer when it comes to adaptations. From the classic 1951 Disney animated version to 1999’s TV movie there have been countless different looks at Lewis Carroll’s classic trippy tale of Mad Hatters, smoking Caterpillars and neurotic White Rabbits. The beloved story has unfortunately never enjoyed a flawless live-action transfer, although 1972’s underrated Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was pretty close. Now with the new 3D boom, Tim Burton brings us his own modern take on the story, a sort of sequel shot almost entirely on green-screen with actors’ faces and bodies modified for extra strangeness. 59 years after their masterful animated version, Disney, with the help of its weirdest ally, brings us what looks like the definitive Alice in Wonderland: 3D, animated, live-action, it’s got it all. Whatever the outcome, one can be sure that Tim Burton’s new opus will be crammed full of quirky madness and will indeed be a big adventure, with or without Pee-Wee.