In the first film, she follows the White Rabbit down the hole after she spurns a marriage offer to an obnoxious young nobleman. These movies transform the heroine from a humorous, curious, changeable, often argumentative 7-year-old into a grownup action heroine. I’d missed Burton’s Alice movie, so when the lights went down for Bobin’s, and Mia Wasikowska’s Alice strutted on screen as the skipper of the Wonder, escaping a trio of Malayan pirate junks by steering her Tall Ship between shoals, I thought for sure it was a dream sequence. Now comes Alice Through the Looking Glass, produced by Burton, directed by James Bobin (the vaudevillian maestro of the last two Muppet movies, off his game), and once again written by Linda Woolverton, whose talents meshed better with the fairy-tale world of Charles Perrault in Beauty and the Beast a quarter-century ago than they do with Lewis Carroll’s genius silliness. Since most people saw it as a flesh-and-blood iteration of an old-school Disney cartoon, Disney executives thought they’d found a potent new box-office formula: rejiggering cartoon features or analog Hollywood classics into CGI extravaganzas with star-laden casts and pasted-on subplots filled with “empowerment” and “redemption.” Burton’s Alice in Wonderland paved the way for (among others) Sam Raimi’s Oz the Great and Powerful and Robert Stromberg’s Maleficent.
(Make that semi-live: there were a lot of semi-computerized bodies and faces.) The result was a travesty of Lewis Carroll-Burton said he’d never connected with the book-and an emotionally leaden super-production, but it also was a smash. Burton commercially rehabilitated a venerable title by glutting it with special effects, inserting a new story to add rooting interest and “heart,” and doing it in live action rather than animation. Alice Through the Looking Glass is the misbegotten sequel to a blockbuster that became one of the most influential movies of the decade: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (10).
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