Alice in Wonderland

Starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter. Directed by Tim Burton

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Although its source material is famous and among the most popular of fantasy tales, film-maker Tim Burton's risky adaptation is filled with surprise – and proves curiouser and curiouser.

Despite its misleading title, Burton's mixture of live action and computer-generated animation, also screening in 3-D, is not merely an updated retelling of the 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. Rather, it's a blend of parts of that book and its 1872 follow-up, Through the Looking Glass, with a newly imagined scenario and some altered characters. In effect, it's a sequel of sorts.

For instance, Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is not a young girl but a 19-year-old young woman who is facing a life-defining decision when she falls down a rabbit hole.

In a bizarre dreamscape, she meets the White Rabbit (voice by Michael Sheen), the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the smoking Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), plus a dodo, the March Hare and the Dormouse, all from Wonderland, but also talking flowers, the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) and Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas) from Looking Glass.

Also from the latter's Jabberwocky poem comes the ferocious, "frumious" Bandersnatch creature and the Jabberwock dragon, which Alice, looking like Joan of Arc, must combat with the Vorpal Sword, bringing to life on screen the illustration by John Tenniel of this confrontation.

Other notable snatches from both books include the "Twinkle, twinkle little bat" rhyme and the riddle "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" – with some new creations like the bloodhound (Timothy Spall) and the nervously sweating tart-eating frog.

The villains of Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton's tale are a combination of characters from Carroll's two Alice books – the Queen of Hearts ("Off with his head!") and her lieutenant, the Knave of Hearts, both from Wonderland, but actually more based on the Red Queen and Red Knight from Looking Glass.

While Alice is the movie's central figure, the Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter steal the show – the former played by Helena Bonham Carter (Burton's partner) with a bulbously large head.

The Mad Hatter's role has been expanded and embellished for Depp (in his seventh movie with Burton), becoming a cartoon figure with wild orange hair and large green eyes, who slips in and out of sanity but is generally kind and sympathetic, so much so that he wins Alice's affection, which prompts her to try to rescue him when he's captured by the Queen of Hearts.

What Burton and Woolverton (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast) achieve is turning Carroll's works from a picaresque series of nonsense or strange vignettes into a coming-of-age story about a person having to try to fulfil a prophecy in order for a rebellion against the Queen of Hearts to succeed.

However, while their story provides momentum and an end goal, it is also a familiar echo of many previous fantasy-adventure movies, especially recalling The Wizard of Oz, whose novel source was itself partly inspired by Carroll's books.

Similarities abound between Dorothy and Alice, Oz and Wonderland – the tornado and the rabbit-hole fall, the Wicked Witch of the West and the Queen of Hearts, the good witch Glinda and the White Queen, and the aim of both heroines to get home or back to real life.

As a result, the invention and creativity that surprises here is countered by an at times overly conventional fantasy storyline.

Visually, Burton's movie is a treat, if an odd union between the usual appealing dream spectacle of Disney and Burton's own dark and Gothic nightmare elements, seen previously in his movies Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd.

The often disparate sizes of characters in the same scenes – such as the tall stick figure Red Knight (Crispin Glover) with the bobble-headed queen and a too small or too tall Alice – makes for an awkwardly disproportionate mesh on screen.

Meanwhile, the natural depth given to this whimsical world by 3-D enhances its impact, although Burton cannot resist opportunities to project objects towards the audience.

One can only guess what Carroll would have made of this clever, daring and slightly mad concoction – but then, it is a movie which deems all "the best people" to be a bit mad.

If it's a film that could upset some moviegoers expecting and even wanting a cinematic creation faithful to Carroll's books, there's still much to admire and enjoy here.

In its own right, it is more often than not, to use a word from Jabberwocky, "frabjous" – a frequently fancifully fabulous, imaginative and entertaining extension of the Alice books. Callooh! Callay!

- © Fairfax NZ News