Alice im Wunderland

If you are reading this you are probably trying to decide if this 'Alice' adaptation is worth watching or you may have already watched it and are wondering about the reaction of other viewers.

It is the most faithful (to the book) adaptation so far (faint praise as most efforts might as well have been original screenplays) and the sets, special effects, make-up and Muppets are light-years better than what others have tried.

But all is not right with this version of 'Wonderland' so Carroll fans should not get their hopes up too high. The adaptation involves some subtraction and a lot of addition (or as the Mock Turtle would say some 'Ambition and Distraction'). Unfortunately what was added does not begin to compensate for what was left out, it only pads the running length.

They added three scenes from 'Through the Looking Glass'. Stuck between the 'Lobster Quadrille' and the 'Who Stole the Tarts' chapters are: 'Tweedledum and Tweedledee', 'The Walrus and The Carpenter', and 'It's My Own Invention' with the White Knight. So the original story takes a not very entertaining detour-although the Walrus-Carpenter bits are fun and it is interesting to see a pre-Hagrid Robbie Coltrane as Tweedledum. Fortunately they group the three scenes together and it is not as disruptive as placing them separately at different points in the story.

Historically, the model for the characters are the illustrations that Carroll commissioned John Tenniel to carve on wood blocks. Although Carroll based the personality of his title character on ten-year-old brunette Alice Liddell, Tenniel (with Carroll's concurrence) used another model and gave the illustrated Alice her features and her long blonde hair. Although the movie generally deferred to Tenniel's illustrations, they made a critical error in casting Tina Majorino as Alice. She was 13-14 during the filming and looks ludicrous in the role. She was also quite homely at that age and you are thankful that the director used mostly wide shots so you don't have her face filling the screen. Thankfully her acting is so flat that she does not call much attention to herself. But the overall effect would have been so much better if they had used a younger actress (could they have made it three years earlier and used a 10-11 year-old Kiera Knightley).

The movie works in spite of a poor Alice, in large part because of the other major deviation from the Tenniel look. That would be casting Miranda Richardson as the Queen of Hearts. Instead of a fat and ugly queen we get a delicately beautiful one, and a hauntingly over-the-top performance. But it works because the performance is consistent with Carroll's idea of the queen as: 'a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion-a blind and aimless Fury'.

And in her surreal make-up you can't take your eyes off Richardson (you literally focus on her face and see nothing else that is in the frame). Her performance was so inspired that she has been playing fairy tale queens ever since.

All the Muppet characters are excellent but for some reason they made Bill the Lizard a man instead of a muppet lizard. Did the producer owe someone a favor? Bill's scene at the Rabbits's House is the third best in the movie; only the croquet match and the trial are better.

And they messed with Carroll's dialogue for no useful purpose or discernible logic. For example they kept all the 'Mock Turtle's' puns, which are hard to follow even in print, while deleting some of the best lines from Alice's scene with the 'Cheshire Cat'; and the tea-party dialogue (and editing) is a shambles. You can't always tell when an original line was omitted but you can tell when something was added by the hack they hired to do the adaptation-all are stupid and some so modern that they are like hearing an off-key note on a flute.

Carroll's dialogue and Alice's thoughts are really the essence of the story.

Someday a director will shoot this thing with mega-reaction shots of Alice (played by a pleasing looking 'young' actress) and with voiceovers of her thoughts-then we will have something that really communicates Alice's curiosity, courage, kindness, intelligence, dignity, and sense of justice. Most important is to communicate her simple wonder (the only wonder about Majorino is how she got the role). The reader was meant to identify with these qualities but only Disney's Alice effectively exhibited them. It's sad when it is easier to identify with the book and with a cartoon Alice than with any of the actresses who have played the role.

Although some part of each chapter is included (Down the Rabbit-Hole, The Pool of Tears, The Caucus-Race, Little Bill, Advice from a Caterpillar, Pig and Pepper, A Mad Tea-Party, The Queen's Croquet-Ground, The Mock Turtle's Story, The Lobster Quadrille, Who Stole the Tarts, and Alice's Evidence), the bookend pieces of the story where Alice is not dreaming are missing. Instead there is a 'Wizard of Oz' kind of scene with the actors out of costume, playing guests at a garden party. This is done entirely to tie in with the writer's annoying artless addition of a preachy "the show must go on" theme which works to deflate each scene in which it is inserted.

This is the only unforgivable change to the story. Wonderland was not a process of self-discovery or personal development, it was a gift to the real Alice (and to future children) and should always end with the thoughts of Alice's older sister after hearing the details of the dream: 'Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman, and how she would keep, through all the years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood; and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago; and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days'. This is Carroll telling us why he made up the story.

Bottom line it is the best of the Alice films, a little too long but still worth watching-especially for the Miranda Richardson scenes.

I have seen the film it was shown over the easter weekend here and it's great i have seen many of the different versions when I was a child but this one is great the puppets and special effects in just two hours they managed to get two books in and it wasn't that much different to the version made in the 1970's except that one was musical,but it's just the same except for the new bits added on to the story.

Alice's adventures in Wonderland have always been easy to visualize, thanks to Tenniel's classic illustrations; but they have been difficult to realize. With computer technology at the state it's at at the turn of the twenty-first century, for the first time Tenniel can come to life in a way that doesn't look like animation.

This is the best looking "Alice" ever. The backgrounds are consistently excellent. The passage from one episode to the other is suitably dreamlike. The computer-animated characters are superb.

The cast is variable. Tina Majorina was a revelation as Alice. I had to check imdb to make sure she wasn't just someone like Reese Witherspoon, an older actress able to look ten years younger. Her performance was exquisite, even better than Fiona Fullerton's 1972 Alice.

Martin Short was good as the Mad Hatter (everyone has a favorite Mad Hatter from days past, and mine was Robert Helpmann from 1972, who also played the child-catcher in "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang"). All the royalty were good. Problems in the cast were Gene Wilder; it might've been his most understated performance since his droll turn as Willie Wonka, but good as he was, he was nevertheless out of place and looked ridiculous and uncomfortable in his costume. Too, though Whoopi Goldberg wasn't bad as the Cheshire cat, the point of her performance was to show Whoopi Goldberg as the Cheshire cat rather than the cat itself.

The "Looking Glass" intrusions weren't out of place. A miniseries doing "Wonderland" one night and "Looking Glass" the next might've been nice, but the best elements were taken from "LG" and the results don't look patched in. The cameos, again, are variable. Robbie Coltrane is an actor too little used and it's good to see him anywhere; and though I might've preferred to see him in a dual role, he worked well with George Wendt as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Christopher Lloyd was perfectly cast as the White Knight, but the White Knight got short shrift and was hardly worth sticking in at all, other than -- once more -- to say, "Look, we got Christopher Lloyd in a thankless role!". "The Walrus and the Carpenter" was not at all distracting -- and with Peters Ustinov and Postlethwait one would almost wish for a whole movie just about them.

The problems, however, do keep it from being the authoritative "Alice". For one thing, someone thought it would be clever to add lines. In most filmed novels this isn't so bad, since the dialogue in books serves a different purpose than the dialogue in movies. But Carroll's dialogue is so precise he might've been writing a play; and it's so well known that any extraneous line stands out like re-writings in "Hamlet". One gets the idea that the writers thought they were as clever as Carroll, and proved that the most notable thing about them was their collective ego.

This led to particular difficulties with the caterpillar. Ben Kingsley was a good choice for the role and -- like everyone else in the movie -- was very good. But his part seemed altered enough to make one suspicious of the writers' intentions. The framing sequence wasn't bad (again, perhaps a whole movie with that cast in non-Wonderland parts would be wonderful), not as bad as Carroll purists would say, but was unnecessarily preachy, as if the story had to have a moral at the end.

A number of roles in the "Alice" books should, when performed, have human performers: The Mad Hatter, the King and Queen and Jack of Hearts, the Duchess, Tweeledum and --dee, the White Knight, et. al. Some, since we have the technology, should be done by computer graphics, with famous voices, if need be. Star-studded "Alice" vehicles have appeared in the past: the top-heavy 1985 Natalie Gregory "Alice", for instance, where a famous actor's face had to be seen in every role; and the notable 1972 Fiona Fullerton bomb, where many of Britain's finest actors (including Peter Sellers and Ralph Richardson) made complete fools of themselves.

Overall, this is the best Alice ever made (including Disney's). It has dreadful moments where famous actors are shoehorned into roles just to say they're there. It has peculiar elements from "Looking Glass" mixed in at odd angles, but such as they are they aren't terrible. And it has a beautifully talented Alice. For those who aren't dogmatic about their Carroll, this is the one to see if you're looking for an "Alice" to pass an afternoon. And children, who don't know any better than we opinionated adults, will be delighted.

As you watch the beginning of "Alice in Wonderland", pay close attention to the guests at the tea party. You might notice Martin Short and his companion, a man placing two buns atop his head as if he were, say, a March Hare. Notice also the man flirting with the woman at the end-you could almost call him a scurvy Knave. But enough with the plays on words. This version of "Alice in Wonderland" was exceedingly well done. From the moment Alice falls down the rabbit hole to the moment she catches the apple, we are spellbound by the fantasy the film has woven for us. Part of its appeal is its satirical notions. Consider the "caucus race", where everyone is cheating. Cynics of politics might agree with this. There is also the trial at the end, where the evidence is as insubstantial as a house of cards. One needs to watch the film or read the novel many times to pick up all of the references!

I enjoyed watching Alice's transformation from stage fright child to confident young girl. It was a continuing thread that helped the story attain a greater level of continuity. Yet the most entertaining portions of the film were those with Martin Short, Miranda Richardson, and Gene Wilder, to name a few. They held nothing back, which magnified the absurdities of their characters to the nth degree. Lastly, the featuring of the tea party at the beginning of the film and the end helped tie it together. A well done film.

I, like most of the rest of you, grew up with the story of Alice In Wonderland- but what I knew was from the Disney story. I never really liked it, but after seeing Hallmark's representation, I decided that Disney completely ruined the book.

Hallmark's costume designer apparently took a look at the sketches that are commonly associated with the story. In fact, the book of Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass that I have from England has these sketches in them, and comparing the costumes to the actual drawings shows very little difference minus color, movement, and the addition of the third dimension. Being a person who tends to favor pretty over plot in movies, the animatronic puppets (such as the griffin, the flowers, and the flamingo-croquet) and other visuals made a very fun and entertaining veiwing

experience.

As for the acting, it is obvious that there is a rather star-studded cast. Martin Short is probably the best I've ever seen him as the Mad Hatter. Sure, he is insane- but he's called a "mad" hatter for a reason. It is very interesting to see the man known for playing ghandi in a large caterpillar suit playing what is commonly known to be the trippiest character in the book. Also, frankly, the queen of hearts in the disney version terrified me as a girl (as well as tweedle dee and tweedle dum), but here they seem less harmful- but they still embody the insanity which basically prevails in the story. Personally I think the "bratty little girl" version of hte queen is a much better take on that character. It makes Alice's maturity over the course of the story more reasonable.

Speaking of story, nobody ever said that Carroll's stories made THAT much sense. So that can't exactly be argued.

Over all- I think its a must see if you've ever enjoyed the stories of Alice.