No wonder in this land

 

 

Looking at “Alice in Wonderland”, I was hoping that director Tim Burton had struck a fine balance between Alice’s adventures and his animation cum reel life characters. But Burton blows his chance of adding a delicious and dark layer to Lewis Carroll’s timeless characters in true Tim Burton style and barring a couple of bright spots in the art direction, it is a run of the mill fantasy flick.

Alice returns to the wonderland she visited in her childhood as a 19-year-old. Her journey unfolds well with reasonably decent special effects and animation. The story is stereotypically on the ‘fight-for-the -throne’ lines and highlights the conflict between the two queens; red and white. While all your favourite characters - the Cheshire cat, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Mad Hatter and the like are all in there, their roles never acquire the strange random qualities that Carroll’s original characters had.

The dumbing down makes Alice’s journey through this dream as a heroine in wonderland unimaginative and at points, even banal. Just look at Johnny Depp as Mad Hatter, the most Burtonesque element of them all in the film. Depp’s performance is fairly average and looking at it all only makes you wish that you never lived next door to this Alice.