Saturday, July 26, 2025

Walt Disney, part LXIX: You were just as dim-witted the first time you were here, you called it "Wonderland," as I recall


ALICE IN WONDERLAND

2010
Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Linda Woolverton

Spoilers: moderate


If one's dealing with the history of Disney animation, one has to at least allude to the fact that the Walt Disney Company, starting in 1950and earlier than that, counting hybrids that had cartoons in them but weren't, themselves, cartoonsbranched off into live-action filmmaking as a hedge against the possibility of the animation studio sliding into oblivion.  Well, Cinderella hit, so Disney remains synonymous with its animation, and yet from time to time, we've glanced over at Disney's live-action effortsin most cases, I've really only been indulging myself, because while TRON might be a animation/live-action hybrid worth contemplating in its connection with Disney, and Dick Tracy and Pretty Woman might be important enough to the executive rivalries that developed at Disney back in the 90s to discuss them, mainly I just felt like it.  But of course there comes a point, very early, where you have to sever the live-action side of the company from the animation side, since by the 70s (if not long before) the ratio of live-action Disney features to animated ones had gotten overwhelming, and, after all, your focus is on the evolution of Disney animation, not the eternal struggle to catalogue comedies about trained animals or every Touchstone movie.  Of course, when you hit the 90s, you'll also have to decide if even every cartoon that's been technically released under the Disney banner needs to make it in, which is as much to say, "are we doing Pixar?", and even if you have the same blatantly misjudged sense of your own capabilities that I do, you'll still say "no."  But come 2010, a new and even more difficult question of scope arises: what happens when "live-action" is a cartoon, and Disney realizes they can conjure gold out of thin air by remaking their old animated classics with "live-action" as their marketing hook but the real selling point is nostalgia modernized with all the bells and whistles of modern CGI?  Have we obliged ourselves to take on that?

The answer to that is "good God, no."  I've avoided the things for a while now, both as a matter of principle but also as a matter of disinterestbut then, it's a core principle of mine to avoid things when I ain't interestedand I see no reason to change that position now.  And despite everything, I'm still compelled to have at least a measure of intellectual interest in them, for they are incredibly industrially importantstarting from 2010, Walt Disney Pictures' remakes of Walt Disney Animation Studios' movies have outgrossed actual WDAS cartoons by a substantial margin, $10.3 billion to $8.5and, indeed, they've become so industrially important that it's not even just Disney doing this to their traditionally animated features anymore, which at least has some theoretical claim to adapting the stories into a wholly distinctive art form.  At present, the fourth highest-grossing American movie of 2025 is DreamWorks' remake of How To Train Your Dragon, a movie that came out in 2010, after this fucking trend had already started,* and that suggests an even more dangerous phase has begun, because now you don't even need a fusty (that is, thirty year-old) hand-drawn cartoon for your remake, you can do a CGI remake of a CGI movie, still glowing with current cultural relevancy, and does that ever open up the hellgate.  (You ready for Despicable Me?  Motherfucking Madagascar?)  Now, sure, there have been signs that this trend could be on its way to extinguishing itselfthe recent remake of Snow White was the kind of box office catastrophe that we've frankly gotten a little too accustomed to from 2020s Hollywoodbut it turns out the underperformers are probably more a matter of flukiness, and not choosing the right nostalgia to exploit, than any actual rejection of the concept: the first highest-grossing American movie of 2025 is Lilo & Stitch.  Meanwhile, although you could quibble with how I arrived at that "$10.3 billion" figuredoes Maleficent count? does Maleficent 2? and for the record I did count Christopher Robin, because if today's subject counts, then Christopher Robin has to, given they're basically identical set-upsI actually didn't count Pete's Dragon, partly because the original Pete's Dragon isn't a "canonical" Disney animated feature, and mostly because it wouldn't have mattered much if I did: 2016's Pete's Dragon is the Disney animation remake that's most obviously worthwhile, so of course it was one of the trend's biggest flops, confirming that the only thing The People actually wanted was to be fed what they'd already eaten and digested, which is roughly the cinema of today.

Still, I have a distinct sense of unease with being a snobbish dickhead about movies I've mostly not seen, no matter how certain I am I don't need to, and I've also had for a long time a small measure of curiosity about the movie that started the trend, whose success represents a full billion of that $10.3 billion figure all by itself.  It was not, of course, the very first: for no reason that makes itself particularly obvious to me, of all the classic cartoons they could've done, Disney did a live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians all the way back in 1996 (at least the 2000 sequel is explicable, because the original remakeoh dear, I used the phrasedid pretty well); even before that, in 1994, Disney released The Jungle Book, though when you recall that it's a relatively frequently-adapted book (and this new adaptation didn't originate at Disney), I don't think we need to be too confused why that one exists.

But the one in 2010 is different because it created a juggernaut.  This was Alice In Wonderland, and it's obviously distinctive in its scale and intentions, and it prompts one to reach a bit for a faux-profound symmetry, because Disney's 1951 Alice In Wonderland was in a race with Cinderella as to which one of them was going to be Disney animation's big make-or-break 1950 release; and given that Cinderella saved the studio, and Alice In Wonderland was a flop that probably would have killed it, there's something a little ironic about how the first in the line of really serious Disney animation remakes turned out to be a lavishly-budgeted re-do of the movie that would've ended Disney animation if it had gotten to theaters even slightly earlier.  As for why they decided to resurrect Alice In Wonderland, as near as I can determine, it was basically an accidentsimply the result of Disney executives asking Linda Woolverton, principally of Beauty and the Beast fame, for her ideas for a big effects-driven fantasy film, and what Woolverton tossed back was a pitch for a new adaptation of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.  I guess we can spot her that framing, though Disney wouldn't (at least these days, they use the same title font on both their Alices**), but Woolverton got to work on her script, and they hired Tim Burton to direct it, so along came Danny Elfman, Burton's music slave, along with storied producer Richard Zanuck, whose last decade on Earth was spent helping Burton transition into the "everybody thinks he sucks" half of his career, starting with another reimagining, Planet of the Apes.  The repertory players came along too: Helena Bonham Carter would play the Red Queen, and Johnny Depp would play the Hatter, the latter of whom I can easily envision being diligently pursued for that part even without Burton thanks to the post-Jack Sparrow renewal of his stardom, though Burton made it all but inevitable.

So far, I'll be honest: all of this makes sense, and I think a very reasonable person could've been stoked for Burton's take on a subject that's not really his kind of whimsical horror, but is certainly "of" whimsical horror, so even if you're like me, though I suppose most aren't, and find Carroll's novel to be pretty obnoxious (this is more like a freeform mash-up of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glassand et cetera, actually), then the fact that Burton probably wouldn't strike the same exact tone could sound like more of a relief than anything else.  What does start to become a little worrisome is how rapidly it becomes clear that Woolverton was determined to make the most generic adventure story out of this material, basically rationalizing a world that had been previously and not-altogether-unfaithfully adapted as a vignettish smoosh of semi-comic and intentionally-incoherent psychedelic cartoon shorts into something more like a post-Lord of the Rings high fantasy.  Because of course she did, I don't even necessarily blame her, but at that point maybe Lewis Carroll, or the 1951 film, just aren't the right source material.

Not that I want to see a live-action do-over of The Black Cauldron, but it would make more sense, right?

In any case, we do have some simulacrum of "a story" with Woolverton and Burton's Alice In Wonderland: in a period that I think we'd probably need to identify as "specifically the late 1870s," though Woolverton's screenplay and also the production and costume design prefers "a nebulous period that's probably closer to the previous century***," Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) has grown up and at least made a half-hearted attempt to put away childish things, though she remains afflicted by certain recurring dreams.  She's been inveigled to a lordly estate out in the country to get engaged to a rather unappealing aristocrat, and... frankly, I feel oppressed even bothering with this.  It occupies a great deal of time or at least feels like it does, but Alice's "real" world is all superfluous clomping, and exactly what you'd expect it to be if a screenwriter was attached to the idea of giving her protagonist a humanizing backstory and some superficial feminism, but didn't actually give a shit, and the film's later insistence that Alice's real-life problems had been mirrored in her adventure in Wonderland, and that her odyssey taught her lessons of great value in resolving them, is some of the most disingenuous crap I think I've ever seen, rising fully to level of a screenplay lying straight to your face.  Anyway, "Alice is unhappy or at least restless" is all we need (it is, certainly, all the 1951 film needed), and the valuelessness of it is perhaps recognized by how the instant that we've gotten all the exposition about Alice's situation Woolverton feels bound to give us, Alice runs off chasing after a rabbit (Michael Sheen) and tumbles into Wonderland immediately, with no further thought given to any of this stuff till the epilogue.

Now the movie starts going through situations and icononography from the book and/or 1951 film, and the basic complexion of the conflict is thus: the freakish and evil Red Queen has taken over the land ("Underland," it turns out, get ithuzzah, that's extremely worthwhile) from her younger and milder sister, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), who has nonetheless continued to wage a low-intensity civil war from her holdfast and still commands the allegiance of most of, sigh, Underland's denizens.  What that amounts to, however, is that they've been waiting for some time for the return of their chosen one heroine, and now she's back, but after figuring out the most basic, basic rudiments of the size-changing potion and cake, when she's confronted with her former acquaintancesthe Caterpillar (Alan Rickman), the Dormouse (Barbara Windsor), Tweedledum and Tweedledee (I was going to make a rude joke that it was The Great British Baking Show guy, but the twins are indeed The Great British Baking Show guy, Matt Lucas), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the March Hare (Paul Whitehouse), and the Hatter, and while she doesn't meet them all at once, as recall it is in two big clumpsshe doesn't remember them and doesn't understand what the hell they could possibly want from her.  Still, if their champion has returned, then the Red Queen can't abide it, so she dispatches her chief lieutenant/reluctant lover the Knave of Hearts (Crispin Glover) to hunt Alice down and destroy her, lest she fulfill the prophecy, obtain the Vorpal blade, and slay the Jabberwocky [sic] (Christopher Lee).

So that's a lot of talented people embarrassing themselves, some of them as some of the last things they'd ever do, but fundamentally we've got a Hook or A Game of You or Flex Mentalloso you see what I mean when I said Christopher Robin is the same thingand although I didn't know it at the time, it presages the exact same problem that Christopher Robin had, in that this is a psychological thriller with meta overtones about regressing back to childhood to either solve some problem of the past, or use childhood's resiliency to overcome the problems of the present, and, like, of course it isn't, not even to the extent freaking Hook was, where it was only a vague sense that it knew it was supposed to be.  Alice In Wonderland doesn't get that far, and it doesn't even really have a literalized fantasy adventure for us, either.  It's as much a collection of recognizable Carroll phrases stuffed into a sack and dumped out haphazardly into the dialogue, so that essentially at no point does anyone have to do anything drastic, like develop a personality or meaningfully interact; it is fairly evident that this counted to its makers as "doing Carroll" but as little time as I have for his absurdism, it was usually still a cognizable aesthetic with a method embedded in its madness.

At best, this is just wacky shouting in pursuit of anti-Red Queen sloganeering (so I guess Depp is indeed the star of the show, while the Cheshire Cat, an anarchic if rather sinister pleasure in the 1951 film, gets the most repulsive repositioning, as a big ol' hero and easy deus ex machina), and yet it barely seems to have any more interest in taking its scenario literally for its own plot-driven purposes than the 1951 film.  It just sort of slurries: at no point, for instance, does even one of [W]underland's poor resistance fighters actually attempt to reawaken Alice's dormant memories of high adventure so as to advance the plot, and at any given moment it's awfully damned fuzzy what Alice's position on her "dream" (or psychotic break!) is and how she's decided to relate to it.  In other words, somehow this Alice In Wonderland, which does have a plot and is utterly dependent on its protagonist's character, isn't any better at making her a character than the cartoon was, just switching out "constantly piqued" for Wasikowska's "constantly depressed."  Alice In Wonderland seems to think that it's done the job by delineating a moral arc for Alice, which starts with her refusal of the obligation to slay the Jabberwocky, because she would rather not slay anything, and which ends pretty off the target from how you'd expect this to resolve (I guess sometimes you've just gotta be soldier and behead the dragon anyway, so don't be a pussy about it?), though it'd be more confusing if Woolverton weren't so obviously bored with her own story that there's honestly not even a slight sense of culmination attached to this development.  Then again, there's not any apparent recognition that there's ever been much of any particular contradiction between "Alice continues to believe this is just one more inconsequential dream until shockingly late in the film" and "Alice is deeply concerned about how to be a moral person in a world she doesn't even think is real."  (Or if that doesn't convince you the makers were bored with their own movie, consider whether maybe there's a contradiction to the White Queen's own blood-oath pacifism and a magic potion lab full of, um, severed humanoid fingers.  Also, if Underland is real and boasts of its own independence existence, why would Alice matter?)  Then sometimes the movie starts trying to pin emotional seriousness onto its non-character characters anyway, most bullyingly so with Depp's Hatter and his, uh, tragedy?  I guess?  Though the most laughable beats come when Carter evidently expects us to notice the pained, insecure humanity of a character who was introduced to us excited to behead one of her footmen and subsequently eat his children, and who looks like this:


It sucks, and it's really boring, and there's more personality evinced by the Disney+ copywriter who offered the parental warning, "Rated PG for fantasy/action violence involving scary images and situations, and for a smoking caterpillar."  I think the hope was that Burton would rescue it with his customary gothy, semi-edged weirdness, which has happened before and even in his 21st century (hell, I like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), but that sure doesn't happen here; it's actually quite startlingly anonymous, enough so that unless you jumped to conclusions based on the Expressionist-lite design of a few wrought-iron gates, I don't think you'd ever guess it was a Burton movie if you didn't already know.  It's mostly just very unpleasant digital art where the joins between layers is constantly obvious and the layers don't really work together very well anyway, what I'd have called "slop" before that meant something even less human, though this is certainly a forerunner of it, and Burton apparently instructed Dariusz Wolski to "shoot" it (that is, "color grade" it) like a David Fincher film, possibly in service to the vaguest notion of the aridity of Alice's adulthood has been reflected back into her dreamworld, though it doesn't play, it mainly just makes a movie sold on a belligerently hideous colorfulness into a movie that can only offer a hideousness that's muted and dreary.  (I really can't imagine how murkily dim this must've looked in 3-D, a major driver of that billion-dollar box office I mentioned.)  Keeping with the script, there are very few visual concepts that even temporarily allow you to take it seriously as an adventure: a moat filled with mold-blackened severed heads that Alice must use as stepping stones is... okay, actually metal, but that's practically it.

So Burton gets that sad clown performance out of Depp, which has its moments and at least has the benefit of receiving the only really strong effort from the costuming and makeup department (Hathaway is an honorable-enough poseable prop, but the White Queen is undeniably less creative and dynamic), and then Burton mishandles his then-girlfriend's performance pretty much top-to-bottom, starting, I suppose, by not impressing upon Carter that her CGI grotesque simply cannot support any actual acting, just funny shrieking.  But then, that's a special case for the perpetual inability of the movie to ever find a tone, feeling like it'd be much more comfortable being an avowed (if annoying) comedy, but the Fantasy Epic Seriousness of it keeps sapping the energy.  I swear to God, there's nothing the movie is ever "about" more than the rather faint comedy of Alice continually being the wrong size, which feels quite a bit like they added $20 million to the film's digital effects budget (I'm guessing, but it's about two-thirds of the film that Wasikowska needs to be entirely greenscreened-in) solely to keep making jokes about her clothes suddenly becoming too big or too small to cover her, so the actual sensation is that you're watching a movie where Burton's foremost interest in it was sneaking as much of an Alice In Wonderland-themed porno as possible even though of course not very much is possible, and its salaciousness is obviously going top out at "I agree that Mia Wasikowska does have a most sexy collarbone."  But then, it does give us the film's one laugh-out-loud line read from Glover when the slavering Knave corners big-phase Alice in a corridor and lecherously declares "I like... largeness."  So it goes, and there's not otherwise the least bit damn flair to the drink-me-eat-me gaggery, but at least it obviously interested the director, and upon the expiry of this as a visual device, Burton really checks out for another half-hour of what I guess we'd have to objectively describe as "action climax" even if that would set you up for all kinds of disappointment, and that half-hour might've taken me an hour to finish, because I kept pausing it to see how much Goddamn runtime this 108-minute movie could possibly still have left.

Score: 3/10

*There's also something just disgustingly bullshit to how it's directed by the same guy; like, it's not even trying to pretend there's some novel value being exploited here.
**All three, even; this movie got a sequel.
**A late line has Alice declare that it's time Britain started trading with China, and, like... you've fought two whole wars to open "trade" with China already.  There is bustling "trade with China."

11 comments:

  1. This is a timely review for me to read because I just finished a draft of a review of the HTTYD LARM, and this points out a couple of items I hadn't thought about. One such being, and I'm genuinely not sure about it, is this really a LARM, or is it just a new adaptation of Alice (which I agree is an over-loved story)? It kinda feels to the format like Halloween is to slashers; i.e. it created and popularized it, but wasn't intentionally doing so. I haven't seen it, but from the sounds of it, it borrows some ideas from the '50s movie but isn't going out of its way to evoke it. I always thought of The 2016 Jungle Book as the proper kickoff of the trend. I'm sure there is some, as you say, "industrial history" out there I can read to figure out when the lightbulb actually went off of creating and marketing the films as a "remake" from the ground up (now that I think about it, maybe it's Maleficent or Cinderella), though I guess even that is a bit fuzzy and arbitrary as a distinction -- I'd forgotten about those 101 Dalmations movies you point out that clearly ARE doing that, though I rarely see them counted in the trend. (FWIW, Tim Brayton counts all of the above in his Letterboxd list, but not the 1994 Jungle Book, which I only learned about from this review.)

    I had missed that Pretty Woman was in your Disney retrospective. Actually made me laugh when I saw that. Now I need to read your review and find out why.

    Good review. It locks in my instinct that I would not enjoy this. (Though I do tend to find garishly over-graded color schemes more appealing than the average movie fan...)

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    1. Basically Pretty Woman was a real big deal for Katzenberg. Enjoyed your HTTYD '25 review.

      You know, you and Donnie mention The Jungle Book, but Cinderella is there a year earlier (oh, Kenneth Branagh, you will job), and iirc may be bringing less new spin than The Jungle Book did? (Besides Pete's Dragon, my experience with them is that The Jungle Book is a highwater mark; photorealistic animals is to no small degree a meaningfully different take on the material, and Idris Elba's pretty terrific with a pretty distinctive Shere Khan.) It is kind of interesting from 20,000 feet to see how Disney groped around doing movies, starting with this one, that were notionally and sometimes more-than-notionally new adaptations or different takes, until settling on what I understand to be the braindead "just the old movie, plus forty minutes of tangential new scenes" approach with Beauty and the Beast and discovering that that was the most successful.

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  3. Not that I want to see a live-action do-over of The Black Cauldron, but it would make more sense, right?

    I mean, a proper adaptation of the Chronicles of Prydain books would be a worthwhile endeavor on paper, even if Disney would likely bungle it again. (Random aside: my dad started watching Black Cauldron on Disney Plus because he was a fan of the books, and I stepped in to remind him that he had already seen it on DVD over a decade ago, and he was deeply enraged after finishing it.)

    Nice review! Are you going to branch out into some of the other live-action remakes, or is this just a one-off due to Alice being the trend-setter? (Though I agree with Dan that it feels like Jungle Book is more responsible for the current wave of LARMs than Alice is.)

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    1. "Good God, no!" (Actually, I'll probably sneak Pete's Dragon in here.) At some point I should do a Tim Burton movie I genuinely like (I guess I've obliged myself to watch Frankenweenie for a third time which absolutely won't be doing that any favors).

      As I mentioned to Dan, it feels like Beauty and the Beast is the one that REALLY did the job of quashing feints towards creativity, though I guess I ought to leave that to people who've seen it. And in fairness we do have Cruella coming much later (still counts, and it's the last one of these I watched albeit to a large degree because there wasn't much to watch in 2021 period), and there's, like, some kind of effort there, I guess, even if it's positively no good.

      I am agnostic re: The Chronicles of Prydain, I don't actively want it but would not grouse if somebody (preferably not Disney, probably) decided to take it on, and could be convinced. (Maybe I ought to have checked them out when I looked at The Black Cauldron, I dunno, but there's so much of it. Like, I'd have to read at least The Book of Three AND The Black Cauldron, right?)

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  4. Surprised at this pit-sop on the way to Tangled, but you are right that it is fair to cover enough of these to reflect their effect on Disney's business, their animation legacy, their current works, and the rest as we approach the period (without being there yet, of course) when their cravenness started to take over all other impulses. Also that we can really only consider the wave reflecting them as they stand now to have begun with Cinderella, The Jungle Book (for being a giant hit while hewing closer to the source material) or BatB (for laying the groundwork of transplanting the original with 30-odd minutes of fluff squeezed in along the way).

    This and the '96 101 Dalmatians (plus its sequel) remain the only Disney LARM's I've seen. Which like yourself, probably makes it very intellectually dishonest to presume they're awful, but… come on. Every peer whose opinion I respect validates that presumption, and when even the HTTYD one, which makes basically no DOA "mistakes" the way all these other ones do, can still only provoke a "they shouldn't have", why bother? Life's too short, etc.

    Obviously being a teen at the time (and not even an old teen), I didn't find the film horrible back in March 2010, but there's no way I'd ever revisit it. Though your anecdotes about how forced and unenthusiastic the script comes across, even that seems to check out from what I do recall.

    Matt that Matt Lucas was in this. Not that I'd have known who he was then, of course. I can kinda see it now, even under all that motion capture CGI for the fugly twins.

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    1. "Surprised at this pit-sop on the way to Tangled"

      Somewhat annoyingly, I watched Tangled and remembered only afterwards that I meant to do this and this came out many months ahead of it. I mean, not a movie that's painful to have to rewatch in a week or two, at least.

      I think I am glad I waited fifteen years to watch this, though.

      What if Tweedledum was Noel?

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  5. The conclusion and nadir of Burton's unofficial war trilogy, declining from Mars Attacks! (my favorite Burton movie) through Planet of the Apes. Alice's CG aerial shots could have been directed by Peter Jackson. Your comparison with "AI slop" is spot-on. To quote Attack of the Clones, "Machines making machines. How perverse." I can't even make myself sit through any green-screen movies anymore. I call it "weather report cinema." Sadly, Burton's recent return to physical production doesn't sound good either. Maybe you could review the brief run of Harry Palmer movies instead, as long as you're covering Harry Saltzman productions.

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    1. I still like CGI-powered nonsense myself, but I am getting a little bummed with how everything is just reheated old stuff without even much veneer of novelty or even the promise of a new spin. I couldn't bring myself to be interested in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at all, like... if you actually wanted to do this, you'd have done it in like 1995, right?

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    2. Re: Harry Palmer, I'll tell you that Ipcress did not do it for me, even with Peter Hunt on the case.

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