In 1986 a movie called “Dreamchild” was released.
It imagined an eighty year old Alice evaluating her relationship with Lewis Carroll -the author of “Wonderland” and “Looking Glass”, and coming to terms with the complexity of their relationship.
The smallest moments of this movie were truer to the two masterpieces than Tim Burton’s poisonous “Alice”.
This “Alice” doesn’t have ONE redeeming quality. It is a terrible, terrible piece of product that for all its visual stunningness is cynical beyond belief.
It lacks whimsy, it lacks strangeness, it lacks anything resembling a heart or a brain. Burton should have trusted his source material and his imagination and filmed a straight up “Through The Looking Glass”. What the fuck did he write this grown-up Alices’ horrible battle with the Queen of Hearts for? His scriptwriters try to best Carroll? Are they insane? They don’t even enter the arena -they don’t come close -maybe Tom Stoppard had shot at it but none of these hacks do.
Disney released it and their pretty awful toon version from the fifties beats this shit to death with a stick.
One more thing: It is slanderous of Helen Bach to compare the bland as wallpaper Alice to our Mary Magpie, our Mary has more pure spirit of rebellion in her little finger than this entire disaster could even dream of.