Alice in Wonderland

The Wonderland (or ‘Underland') of Lewis Carroll was a whimsical, mid-Victorian philosophical landscape where the laws of logic held no sway. In Tim Burton's film, however, it's your run-of-the-mill totalitarian state where the evils of dictatorship are all too banal and familiar. It's where an 18-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) ends up while fleeing the proposals of her stuffed-shirt suitor Lord Hamish (Leo Bill), unaware that she has visited this topsy-turvy world before as a child. A cross between Pandora, Narnia and a graveyard, Underland is where a coterie of creatures from Carroll's books are ready to welcome Alice as the valiant heroine foretold to help the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and the good White Queen (Anne Hathaway) defeat the evil, balloon-headed Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), and restore balance to the Force. Or something like that.  

When a book poses difficulties in adaptation – and they don't come much more befuddling than the Alice books – you can do one of two things: break bravely from narrative tradition to be faithful to the source material (see Where the Wild Things Are), or just go ahead and tell a completely different story. Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton have mainly opted for the latter course. Their pretext is the short ‘Jabberwocky' nonsense poem that Alice finds in Through the Looking Glass, involving a young hero who slays a monster. Eventually, resplendent in Joan-of-Arc get-up, Alice will get the typical rousing speech from an ethereal Anne Hathaway (presumably Cate Blanchett wasn't available) informing her that only she can slay the Jabberwock with the Vorpal Blade. Depp, meanwhile, plays the Hatter as a vengeful Scot, addled by regret, who rises to the call of battle ready to fling hatpins and rolls of fabric at the Red Queen's playing-card soldiers - saving the world with haberdashery. 

It's a shame Burton gets his Lewis Carroll mixed up with his Tolkien and CS Lewis. Still, the film's 3D visuals are fun to look at, and there's a wizard's school worth of great British actors contributing voice work and occasionally even their faces. (Little Britain's Matt Lucas is amusing as Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee.) With her upper lip painted to recall Hitler's moustache, Bonham Carter marches around, petulantly demanding decapitations, while Crispin Glover gets to be surprisingly dashing as her henchman, the Knave of Hearts. As for Aussie newcomer Wasikowska, she does a perfectly capable job of insisting that everything is merely a dream and that she's in control, while an army of special effects technicians shrinks, expands, and tosses her from pillar to post. After this and Avatar, let's hope Australia's latest batch of stars don't need to be propped up by computer animation to make an impact. Nick Dent

10 odd facts... Alice in Wonderland

1. Contrary to popular belief, the 1865 novel's title isn't Alice in Wonderland. It's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

2. Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson) was a mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford. All of the famous scenes in the story - such as the Mad Hatter's Tea Party - were Carroll's swipes at the new imaginary number theory (algebra), which he thought was absurd.

3. Although Tweedledum, Tweedledee, Humpty Dumpty and the Jabberwock are often thought to be characters in the book, they only appear in the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass.

4. Carroll caricatures himself in the book as the Dodo. Carroll/Dodgson was known to have stuttered, so if he spoke his last name it would be Do-Do-Dodgson.

5. Alice is said to be strongly based on Carroll's child friend Alice Peasance Liddell. During the Mad Hatter's Tea party, Alice reveals that the date is 4 May, which happens to be the real-life birthday of Alice Liddell.

6. Biographers suggest that Carroll was romantically or sexually attached to Alice Liddell as a child. The relationship between the Liddels and Carroll suffered a sudden break in June 1863.

7. Hatmaking was the main trade in Stockport, near where Carroll grew up. The Mad Hatter derives from hat makers who suffered from mercury poisoning in the process of curing felt.

8. It's reported that Carroll found inspiration from the Cheshire Cat in the 16th century sandstone carving of a grinning cat located near his birthplace.

9. Queen Victoria enjoyed Alice's Adventures in Wonderland so much that she asked Carroll dedicate his next book to her, and was presented with a scholarly volume titled An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

10. "Alice in Wonderland Syndrome' is a brain condition affecting the way objects are perceived by the mind. Joanna Lowry