Alice im Land des Zauberspiegels

This movie is pure magic for someone who likes 1980's animation. It's bad when it needs to be bad and good when it needs to be good. But beyond being an iconic entertaining 1980's animated made for TV movie this film manages to achieve something which not even a lot of big budget movies does. It perfectly displays how a dream works. It jumps from place to place in quick succession without braking the pace of the movie nor interrupting the plot, just like a dream. It also features some common "dream rules", like for example achieving something impossible with just your own imagination. This together with magic and memorable characters in an interesting world really flares up your imagination, especially after you have seen the movie and the memories starts to blur, just like a good dream.

Something which i should mention though is that the quality of the movie varies depending on which dub you are watching. I personally have mainly watched the Swedish dub since i am Swedish and comparing it to the English dub there is a notable difference in quality where the English dub is worse. I think the English dub is one of the main reasons why a lot of people don't like this movie. Another Swedish dub thing i want to point out is that the Swedish dubbing team didn't get a clean copy of the movie and had to dub over the English voice actors. This isn't a huge problem and is barely noticeable for most of the movie but it really shows during the songs as the music disappears when the characters are singing. This forces the voice actors to sing as well as they can to sort of fill in for the lack of music and some songs like the song "Nothing is impossible at all" sounds really good and deep.

I did actually want to like Through the Looking Glass. I love animation and I wasn't looking for a faithful adaptation of a timeless if perhaps difficult to adapt story. And Burbank Films Australia have shown that they are capable of making good animations, I loved their versions of Wind in the Willows and Peter and also thought their Treasure Island was good. But The Three Musketeers, Old Curiosity Shop and Prisoner of Zenda show that their output can also be disappointing. Sadly Through the Looking Glass was one of the disappointing ones. I did like the voice acting, with the standout being Phyllis Diller and also the surreal touches like Alice in the carriage with a character made of newspaper, the train that takes to the air and the journey via a paddle boat. However, the animation is sub-par with some of the characters looking stiff and flat colouring. The music also manages to be insipid, I do remember hating the Jabberwocky song when I was little and my perception hasn't changed. The script is often too modernised and americanised especially Alice's Kleenex line when she meets the White Knight, the story has some details from the book like the train ride, White Knight and TweedleDum/Tweedledum but a lot of it feels improvised with little of the oddball nature of the story and no sense of threat, the centaurs and unicorn characters are little more than fantasy standard clichés and the Lewis Carroll creations lack colour and absurdity with Alice bland and Jabberwocky made up to be more like cuddly children's' movie monsters, a complete anti-thesis to the famous poem about him. So overall, other than some of the surreal touches and the voice work, Through the Looking Glass was a disappointment. 3/10 Bethany Cox