Alice In Wonderland (Tim Burton, 2010)

[pianocrash]

A set of pics by some English ne'er-do-well have hit (with more to come, judging from the amount of people wielding cameras), and it looks pretty bleak!

- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, & 12, while you can?
And thinkingofyou, I hope you don't work for X17, and if you do I'M SORRY.

- more from the Plymouth Herald here (scroll down for awesome blue hair)

[Mr Sausage]

Looks like another Pirates of the Carribean sequel.

[dx23]

Looks like another Pirates of the Carribean sequel.

And the Lone Ranger.

[domino harvey]

This thread is a good way to discover which among us are members of ONTD

[Barmy]

oooh it looks spoooky

[Macintosh]

Live Journal is lame, someone post some pics so the rest of us can see.

[Matt]

This thread is a good way to discover which among us are members of ONTD

The thread was open access earlier today.

What does a ship have to do with Alice in Wonderland? Is this going to be yet another "reimagining" like Sleepy Hollow (which looked great but that script was crap)?

[domino harvey]

The movie is based on a video game adaptation of the story and not the story itself, I think?

[Kirkinson]

The movie is based on a video game adaptation of the story and not the story itself, I think?

That's a separate project that Tim Burton was once rumored to be doing (though as far as I know Wes Craven was the only director who was ever officially attached to it). Last I heard Universal owned it but I think it's pretty much dead. I thought the current project was the same one Spielberg had commissioned a script for, but apparently that was also a separate project because Dreamworks doesn't appear to be involved with this at all. So I guess it was Disney from the ground up.

I don't know how the set depicted in those pictures is working its way into the story, but I'm betting the "real world" has been heavily padded to give Alice some sort of backstory. It's a common method used by writers of film and TV adaptations of the Alice books who have trouble with the fact that the stories don't have any sort of character development (at least not in a conventional sense). I find it usually results in the least interesting adaptations. The books are very resistant to traditional Hollywood story structure.

[karmajuice]

Burton's going to run out of whimsical and macabre source material if he keeps going at this rate. Then where will he be? Making dark but quirky adaptations of Henry James and Charles Dickens, that's where. Should've paced yourself, Burton. Should've paced yourself.

[Barmy]

Awesome, so it's like an "Alice Begins" thing. I always wondered about her childhood.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

The movie's definitely not based on the game, but I think this advice is still pertinent:

Creating an on edge variation of Carroll's violent, bizarre work would be pointless - like filming an "edgy" remake of Taxi Driver. Not to mention that everyone in the world lost interest in hearing about the latent nightmarishness of Alice on September 17, 1865, four days after the book was released.

Will Burton listen? Probably not.

[skeets kelly]

hey, we'll always have ed wood, right?

[karmajuice]

And I'll always have Beetlejuice, provided I never see it again and manage to maintain my childhood perception of it.

[Murdoch]

And I'll always have Beetlejuice, provided I never see it again and manage to maintain my childhood perception of it.

Not to divert the thread, but I just watched Beetlejuice the other day and it's held up remarkably well for me, probably Burton's most realized film outside of Ed Wood.

[Tootletron]

Looks like another Pirates of the Carribean sequel.

Funny you should say that..

What does a ship have to do with Alice in Wonderland?

Yeah, I can't remember a ship being involved in the story. Maybe it's padding or an extension of the bird/penguin captain whatever it was that was at sea all the time.

[karmajuice]

I just read both books this past summer and was involved with creating a theatrical adaptation of them both, so it's fresh in the mind: there are no boats like that in the books (the only boat I can think of offhand is the rowboat she rides in with the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass). It's definitely some pre-Wonderland extension of the story. Very few actual people appear in Wonderland, and when they do they're often royalty and always absurd (The Red Queen, The White Knight, The Mad Hatter, etc).

Does Burton intend to draw from Through the Looking Glass, too? Most adaptations do, it's pretty much standard practice.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

See what happens when Marilyn Manson drags his feet about making his own movie...

[domino harvey]

Anne Hathaway has joined the cast

[Kirkinson]

Anne Hathaway has joined the cast

Hathaway is playing the White Queen, a benevolent monarch who is deposed and banished by her sister, the Red Queen (Carter), who has an affinity for crying out, "Off with their heads!" The White Queen needs Alice to slay a creature known as the Bandersnatch.

Wow. I've seen more than 20 film and TV adaptations of these books (Lewis Carroll is my favorite author) and this sounds like it's shaping up to be one of the most unconscionable train wrecks ever produced from this source. There have been plenty abysmal Alice productions over the years, but the money and prestige behind this one will make its wretchedness truly colossal.

And I like Tim Burton.

[Mr Sausage]

Much of the charm of the original was its unconcern with conventional fantasy plots in favour of rendering English society in fantastic and parodistic terms--which it did in an original manner. Apparently this isn't good enough, so the movie trades in the book's structure for a conventional quest romance. Alice should be skewering social conventions, not pilfering literary ones. It's Lord of the Rings, only with cats and rabbits.

[Antoine Doinel]

Let's just hope they don't make multiple sequels out of this thing (although I'm sure they will).

[Antoine Doinel]

Tim Burton talks about the film and mentions that it will be in 3-D.

[domino harvey]

Someone brace M. Sausage: Christopher Lee to join film

[milk114]

I wonder if The Looking Glass Wars and Seeing Red had any influence on this film version as well. Provides a bit more traditional dramatic thrust to the story (though not for Carroll purists).