Yesterday, my most significant other and I went to see Disney’s and Tim Burton’s retelling of Alice In Wonderland. To be fair, Disney studios has been telling the Alice in Wonderland story even before Walt Disney left Kansas City in 1923. In short, Mickey Mouse may have built the empire, but Alice built the studio.
Don’t look for a dark retelling of the Lewis Carroll tale in this movie. The Alice saga is something Disney holds very dear and they were determined not to let it become something so scary and dark as to drive off their target audience – no, not children, but the adults who watched the 1951 animated movie of the same name when they were young. That is the audience that will appreciate the story being told of a 19 year old Alice, trying to take charge of her life, and a Red Queen who has read, quotes and has taken to heart Machiavelli’s The Prince.
Did I like it? You betcha, but I shouldn’t have wasted my money by seeing it in 3-D. This film didn’t seem to gain anything as a 3-D experience to me. Mia Wasikowska was an excellent Alice and Helena Bonham Carter was wonderful as the Red Queen. Johnny Depp is probably the most versatile actor of this generation and is the star power being used to draw an audience. But if you think you will be seeing a Johnny Depp movie, you will be very disappointed. This is Mia Wasikowskaa’s movie about Alice, which accompanied by a splendid soundtrack by Danny Elfman, kept me involved in the movie’s storytelling and had me feeling some anguish for the Red Queen in the end.
This was a movie that I think Walt Disney would have liked a lot. It is the Alice story he’d been trying to tell since 1923.