Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, looking back
Burton’s 2010 film did not adapt Lewis Carroll so much as continue him, and its success mattered more to Disney’s future than its reviews did.
Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), have been adapted so often that any new version has to justify itself. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, released by Disney in 2010, did so by changing the question. Instead of retelling the story of a small girl falling down a rabbit hole, it imagined Alice returning years later, as a young woman with no clear memory of her first visit.
A sequel in all but name
In Linda Woolverton’s screenplay, a nineteen-year-old Alice, played by Mia Wasikowska, flees an unwanted marriage proposal and tumbles back into a land its inhabitants call Underland. She finds it under the rule of the tyrannical Red Queen, played by Helena Bonham Carter, while the gentle White Queen, played by Anne Hathaway, waits in exile. A prophecy says Alice is destined to defeat the Jabberwocky, a creature drawn from Carroll’s famous nonsense poem, and so restore the White Queen to power.
Familiar figures return: the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar and, in a much enlarged role, the Mad Hatter, played by Johnny Depp in his seventh collaboration with Burton. The structure, though, is a quest story with a final battle, closer to a fantasy adventure than to Carroll’s episodic, logic-twisting books.
Commercial success
Commercially, the film was a phenomenon. It arrived shortly after Avatar had renewed public appetite for 3D, and it became one of the biggest hits of 2010. It also won Academy Awards for its art direction and costume design, recognition for the visual richness that even its critics tended to admire.
Critical response
Reviews were more divided. Many praised the production design and Bonham Carter’s comic, oversized Red Queen. More common complaints were that the film had sanded away Carroll’s strangeness, replacing riddles and wordplay with a chosen-one narrative, and that its digitally built Underland felt crowded rather than dreamlike. Wasikowska’s grounded performance found admirers, but some felt Alice was a passenger in her own story until its final act.
Its legacy
The film’s longer influence was on Disney’s strategy. Its success is often seen as one of the signals that encouraged the studio to revisit its animated classics as big live-action productions, a trend that shaped much of the following decade. A sequel, Alice Through the Looking Glass, followed in 2016 under a different director and was far less successful.
Seen now, Burton’s Alice is a handsome, slightly hollow spectacle: more interesting as a turning point for a studio than as a reading of Carroll. Its best moments come when the film forgets about prophecy and simply lets its odd characters be odd.