This will surely only combine my obsessions: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland:
The first 3-D flick that Burton will direct for Disney is a live-action/motion capture remake of Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s tale, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The book, filled with hookah-huffing caterpillars, porpoise puns, lobster quadrilles and croquet-obsessed queens, is a natural fit for Burton’s “gothic carnival” imagery.
The best-known of those failed versions is, of course, Walt Disney’s 1951’s animated film. Long considered one of the lesser films in Walt Disney’s animated canon, Alice in Wonderland received a hostile reaction from British critics and disappointing box office on its initial release. It was the only Silver Age animated film to never be re-released theatrically during Walt’s lifetime.
“(Alice in Wonderland) suffered from too many cooks - directors,” legendary Disney animator Ward Kimball told Leonard Maltin. “Here was a case of five directors each trying to top the other guy and make his sequence the biggest and craziest in the show. This had a self-canceling effect on the final product.”
In the late 1960’s, Alice in Wonderland became extremely popular (much to Disney’s dismay) as a “head flick:” a movie that university students would watch while under the influence of recreational pharmaceuticals. The original story, filled with Carroll’s lysergic imagery, has a long history of appealing to the drug culture.
“The stories are like drugs for children, you know?” Burton says. “It’s like, ‘Whoa, man.’ The imagery, they’ve never quite nailed making it compelling as a full story. So I think it’s an interesting challenge to direct.”
