Alice in Wonderland

The 2010 Alice in Wonderland is the story of a girl, played by Mia Wasikowska (Amelia), who is about to leave her teenage years for adulthood. She has lost her father, and her mother wants her to marry an insufferable bore and join well-to-do 19th-century British society. Ever since childhood, Alice has been plagued by dreams starring magical creatures, and while dodging her marriage proposal, she spots one of them, a white rabbit in a waistcoat, darting around the garden. She chases it into a hole in a tree and tumbles down into a strange and fantastical world.

The animals Alice finds there are immediately disappointed. The Dormouse (Barbara Windsor) and the Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) are the first to say it: the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen) has not found the girl that visited them once before and whom a prophetic scroll says will return to kill the Jabberwocky. You see, since little Alice was last here, the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) has taken over and she has turned Underland--previous christenings of "Wonderland" were the mispronunciations of a six-year-old--into a gray, dour place. Much of it is in ruins, and the talking animals who live there have been enslaved to the crazy lady.

Only another crazy person, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), believes that they do indeed have the correct Alice (she keeps insisting she'll wake from this dream), and he puts her on the proper path to rescue the true ruler of Underland before he himself is taken prisoner.





Alice must find the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and become her champion. But first, why not be a little headstrong and break into the Red Queen's castle and free the Hatter?

Alice's grown-up journey is very much like the one she had before, the one we're all familiar with. In fact, what first tips us off to the fact that this is an adventure being repeated is that the animals are baffled that she doesn't know how a shrinking potion or a growth cake will affect her even though she has consumed them before. The various weird characters she meets on her flight from the Red Queen's insidious lackeys, led by a typically wheezy Crispin Glover, are the ones we all know. There is Tweedledee and Tweedledum, played by Little Britain's Matt Lucas, there is a March Hare (Paul Whitehouse), and there is a scene-stealing Cheshire Cat. Stephen Fry voices the cat, and he is a marvelous delight. Voice and animation mesh perfectly to make one wonderful character, a slinky jester who is charismatically feline.

The Cheshire Cat is animated fully on computer, as is the majority of Underland. Some characters are a combination of actors and motion capture. Matt Lucas is turned into twin egg-shaped dimwits, and Helena Bonham Carter is one giant head on a tiny body. Only Wasikowska, Hathaway, and Depp are fully themselves. Crispin Glover, who has trouble maintaining his humanity at the best times, is the oddest hybrid, a herky-jerky splicing of the real thing and a digital creation.