'Alice in Wonderland' Progression Reel

Tim Burton: 'Alice is a very annoying, odd little girl' (The Guardian)

As the director emerges blinking from Wonderland, we peek behind his shades to talk Johnny Depp, Walt Disney and why finishing a film is 'like death'

Nothing is as it should be. Tim Burton hurries into the London hotel room looking not like he has just fallen down the rabbit hole in Alice In Wonderland, but immaculate in black suit, black suede loafers, stripy socks and pin-striped shirt; hair on the large side but not totally feral. The tinted glasses favoured by both Burton and his best buddy Johnny Depp are missing, leaving the director's face open, benevolent even. He drops into an armchair, crosses and uncrosses his legs, jumps up to turn the air conditioning from freezing to hot.

Burton – his soft Californian voice thick with cold – talks in fractured, distracted sentences with his arms behind his head, holding on to the ears of the armchair. At one point, towards the end of our allotted slot, he is almost in tears when talking about Alexander McQueen, whose funeral is taking place nearby. He leans forward and blinks furiously: "I did some drawings for him … Oh God. It's the most tragic thing … A couple of good friends of mine … It's the most haunting thing for me to this day …"

Outside the hotel room it's a different, make-believe world: the corridor is lined with lavish Alice In Wonderland posters featuring Depp as a psychedelic but tender Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as a petulant, mercurial and very funny Red Queen with an enlarged forehead, and 19-year-old Australian Mia Wasikowska as a stridently feminist Alice who looks remarkably like a sulky young Gwyneth Paltrow.

Disney staff stride up and down, herding international press from one room to another, handing out Mad Hatter stopwatches and Alice mugs. It's all very corporate for Burton, who's supposed to be the cool kid, the king of gothic fantasy, the ultimate outsider. In 1994, after starring in Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood but before his appearances in the director's Sleepy Hollow, Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd, Depp wrote of Burton: "He is an artist, a genius, an oddball, an insane, brilliant, brave, hysterically funny, loyal, nonconformist, honest friend."

He may be all those things, but Burton, now 51 and living in Hampstead with Bonham Carter and their two young children, is less indie than most might think. His 3D version of Alice – in which she returns to Wonderland for a second time and reluctantly deposes the Red Queen – cost nearly £160m. According to Variety, it's "a Disney film illustrated by Burton, rather than a Burton film that happens to be released by Disney" – a glorious CG action adventure with obsessive attention to detail.

Burton, who only finished the film two weeks before its release, is exhilarated but exhausted. He's got a typical director's hangover; right now he never wants to make another film. "Alice was an experiment," he says. "We didn't know what the movie was till the very end. It was exciting and scary. Working on the CG just got more and more and more intense. The intensity peaked last week, when we had to stop." He starts to shout: "We had to stop! STOP! I never consider a film finished and this was no different." He suddenly looks bereft: "Finishing a film is like a death in some way." Surely it's more like a birth?

"You're right. Of course it's a birth. But something definitely dies, too. It's an unnerving feeling that takes time to get over."

'Beyond all the kooky bells and whistles of my Alice, it's a simple internal story about somebody finding their own strength'

When Disney approached Burton with the Alice project, he immediately wanted to make a definitive version of a film that has been adapted for cinema and television nearly 30 times. "I've always hated Alice on screen," he says. "She's a very annoying, odd little girl. I wanted to make her into a character I could identify with: quiet, internal, not comfortable in her own skin, not quite knowing how to deal with things, being both young and having an old soul." Did he want Wasikowska to be feminist? "I'm OK with it! Beyond all the kooky bells and whistles of my Alice, it's a simple internal story about somebody finding their own strength. She's been battered around by real life, has never quite fitted in …"

Burton drifts off. For all his public reputation as being bonkers (he lives not with Bonham Carter, but in an adjoining cottage! They don't comb their hair! They are Mr and Mrs Mad Hatter!), Burton is simply an outsider made good. He grew up an introverted child in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank, a bland place he refers to as "Anywhere USA". He watched "crappy" monster movies such as The Brain That Wouldn't Die on TV. He felt alienated but assumed all kids felt the same.

"In my head I was a completely normal child," he says, "but somehow society deemed me to be weird. I felt quite sad about it because people put me aside. And, in a way, nothing has changed. Though my friends would tell you that I'm a pretty regular guy."

Until he temporarily lived in London while making Batman in the late-80s and Sleepy Hollow a decade later, Burton never felt at home anywhere. "When I first came here I had a past-life experience," he says. "I don't get those very often, but I felt extremely at home and comfortable. Weird." He met and fell in love with Bonham Carter on 2001's remake of Planet Of The Apes and soon after moved to his spiritual home full-time.

While earlier films such as Edward Scissorhands were inspired by his Anywhere USA upbringing, recent work such as Sweeney Todd and Alice suggests an Anglophile who by now is pretty much a naturalised Brit. Burton nods enthusiastically: "I've now made more films here than there. I like being away from where the business is. I feel more connected to the film process here. I like the artists, painters and sculptors who live here. They inspire me when I'm making a film."

'It's good to scare kids a bit if they can handle it. Though it might be strange for my son to see his mother with such a large forehead!'

A respected artist himself, with an acclaimed exhibition currently running at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Burton's heavily stylised cinematic world is endlessly inspired by his visual imagination. Yet, for all his talk of not making another movie, he is more smitten by film than any other artistic endeavour. He says his own films are "all my strange children in some way", and that they're all imperfect. "The flaws of a film are part of what it is. I've never made a film that is even nearly perfect. I have different feelings towards different films. Scissorhands was very personal. Nightmare Before Christmas I developed from scratch. I felt very strongly about the material in Ed Wood. Pee-wee's Big Adventure was my first film back in '85. Beetlejuice was such a weird hybrid of a thing. Batman was a big thing for me. My films are like a time capsule of my life; they define my life."

He is unapologetic about using actors on a loop (Depp's now been in seven Burton films to Bonham Carter's six). "I like working with actors who have no real vanity. They're not worried about their careers, they're just kind of, 'Boom! You want to make my forehead big? OK!' I don't think Johnny has ever watched a film we've made together. I know Helena didn't watch Sweeney Todd. She'll watch Alice because we're taking our six-year-old son Billy Ray to the premiere tonight. It's good to scare kids a bit if they can handle it. Though it might be strange for him to see his mother with such a large forehead. I've tried to warn him …"

As the interview draws to a close, Burton talks briefly about heading the jury at Cannes in May. He didn't watch a film for the two years he spent making Alice and is genuinely excited about "reconnecting to movies". He pushes a hand through his hair till it starts, finally, to stick up: "It will be another visit to Wonderland for me. I always go out of my way to be as open as possible with other directors' work because I am acutely aware of the pressure to categorise and label everything. But I'm a moody person," he smiles, "so you never know!"

"Alicia en el País de las Maravillas", de Tim Burton (crítica)

Link (Clarín)

Drinking Blood: New Wonders of Alice’s World (The New York Times)

By LARRY ROHTER

INSTEAD of Wonderland, it’s Underland. Instead of Alice as a bored but clever child, we get Alice as a 19-year-old rebel and warrior, dispatching the monstrous Jabberwocky with a magic sword. Disney’s second rendering of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy, in other words, is a world apart from both its 1951 cartoon version and the original Victorian-era text.

Directed by Tim Burton, “Alice in Wonderland,” a 3-D blend of live action and animation that opens Friday, is meant as a contemporary, subversive take on a cherished story. With the 20-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, who had a breakout role in the first season of HBO’s “In Treatment,” as Alice, it begins with an unwanted marriage proposal before veering off into Underland, where Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen await.

Since “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,” were first published nearly 150 years ago, Alice’s tale has been retold in many versions and many media, including as a musical, anime, video game and more than a score of film and television adaptations. But for Mr. Burton the very abundance and familiarity of the material “in the subconscious and in the culture” was an incentive — not a deterrent — to take it on.

“I’ve seen mostly everything, but there’s never been a version for me that particularly works, that I especially like or that blows me away,” he said this month in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. “It always ends up seeming like a clueless little girl wandering around with a bunch of weirdos. And the fact that there was no one definitive version was helpful. It’s not like the Disney cartoon was the greatest. So I didn’t feel that pressure to match or surpass.”

Linda Woolverton, the film’s screenwriter, had a similar attitude. She said that when she began her script, she “did a lot of research on Victorian mores, on how young girls were supposed to behave, and then did exactly the opposite.” As she put it, “I was thinking more in terms of an action-adventure film with a female protagonist” than a Victorian maiden.

“I do feel it’s really important to depict strong-willed, empowered women,” she added, “because women and girls need role models, which is what art and characters are. Girls who are empowered have an opportunity to make their own choices, difficult choices, and set out on their own road.”

That emphasis on self-esteem and moral uplift has long been characteristic of Ms. Woolverton’s work — and of Disney itself. Originally a writer for children’s television programs like “Ewoks” and “Teen Wolf” and also the author of a pair of novels for young adults, she wrote the screenplays of “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King” and also contributed to “Mulan,” all for Disney.

Thus the river of tears that a confused Alice cries in Carroll’s original text upon arrival in Wonderland has been written out of the story. “I couldn’t have her break down like that,” Ms. Woolverton said. Similarly, a drawing by John Tenniel, the illustrator who worked with Carroll, showing a boy fighting the dragonlike Jabberwock, as it was first called, was transformed into an image depicting Alice in action.

This “sisters are doin’ it for themselves” reading of Alice also comes with a coda, one that seems inspired more by Joseph Conrad than by Carroll. Refusing to marry, Alice instead decides to prove her mettle by shipping out to a trading post her father’s company plans to open in a China that, under force of British arms, has just been compelled to legalize the opium trade, cede Hong Kong and allow its citizens to be sent abroad as indentured servants.

“We’re not that concerned about being historically accurate in a film like this,” said Richard D. Zanuck, one of the movie’s producers. “It’s a piece of entertainment where you have a heroine off to another adventure at the end, and unless I’m wrong, people of all nationalities will just enjoy it as an entertainment and not try to interpret it.”

Disney’s “Alice” follows closely on the heels of a Pynchonesque Syfy channel version in which Alice is a martial arts instructor who comes to the rescue of her boyfriend, who has been abducted by the White Rabbit conspiracy and taken to a Wonderland that has been turned into a casino.

Carroll scholars say that new readings like that and Mr. Burton’s film are to be expected, given that Alice and her story are so malleable. “The books are a kind of Rorschach test, a screen onto which people project their own ideas,” said Jenny Woolf, author of “The Mystery of Lewis Carroll,” a biography published this month. “They are like a verbal cartoon, full of characters who are vivid but little more than sketches.”

In the 1960s that led to psychedelic readings of Alice, exemplified by Jefferson Airplane’s hit song “White Rabbit” and by a much-praised 1966 BBC production, directed by Jonathan Miller and with music by Ravi Shankar, that has just been released as a DVD. In the 1970s a pornographic “Alice” was also filmed, and more recently there was “American Magee’s Alice,” a video game set that features a revenge-minded Alice confined to an insane asylum, with a second installment possibly due in 2011.

“What is really interesting about the recent versions is that they are all a little violent,” said Jan Susina, author of “The Place of Lewis Carroll in Children’s Literature” and a specialist in Victorian culture who teaches at Illinois State University, noting that the goth-and-gore singer Marilyn Manson also has a film project in the works in which he plans to play Carroll. “Since each generation and culture puts its own gloss on the story, that suggests something about our culture.”

Rated PG, this second Disney version of “Alice in Wonderland” has some dark and ominous undertones, both in its look and its story line, that were absent in the cartoon version. Even before Alice becomes a combatant in a Manichean struggle between good and evil, dressed in armor and drinking her vanquished foe’s blood to return to her natural state, she walks across a moat filled with heads to infiltrate the Red Queen’s castle.

“You know, the original piece was considered very dark and is scary for a lot of children who are reading it,” Mr. Zanuck said. “If we had made it for a G rating, we would have wrecked the original story. But you’ll notice that there’s no sense of blood or gore at all, even when she chops off the dragon’s head at the end, and that there’s a magical feeling to it.”

Though Mr. Burton has made many films with fantasy elements, dating back to “Beetlejuice” (1988) and “Edward Scissorhands” (1990), “Alice” is the first of his films made for 3-D. But in contrast to the current blockbuster “Avatar,” which was filmed with 3-D cameras, Mr. Burton used 2-D cameras during the shoot and then converted the footage to 3-D in the postproduction phase.

James Cameron, the director of “Avatar,” has criticized that choice, which can on occasion produce images that seem flatter or not quite as crisp as the technique used in “Avatar.” Without mentioning Mr. Cameron by name, Mr. Burton defended his decision.

“People can take whatever sides they want, but I did it the way I thought was best for this project,” he said. “We didn’t want this to be a movie that took 10 years, and when I saw the difference and looked at the time frame we had to do this movie, it didn’t make sense to do it” with 3-D cameras.

Mr. Burton also said that he sees his version of “Alice in Wonderland” as primarily a lark, surreal and comedic but essentially benign. “I kind of went out of my way to not make it too dark,” he said, adding that his attitude was “Let’s not veer off into that; let it be what it is.”

Over the years the impact of “Alice in Wonderland” has been felt in other works of children’s literature that have also been turned into movies, ranging from “The Wizard of Oz” to C. S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia.” So it is hardly a surprise that references to those worlds seem to pop up in the made-for-2010 version.

“I’m influenced by all of that, from Greek myths all through Narnia and ‘Lord of the Rings,’ ” Ms. Woolverton said. “Ultimately it comes down to good and evil in this world, a sense that there are people who represent the positive and those who have fallen into a dark, more evil value system. That is something that goes to Bruno Bettelheim. But I also think that if you’re going to tell a tale that goes to a dark place, you have to bring your audience out again.”

"Alicia en el país de las maravillas", de Tim Burton (primeras críticas)

By Xan Brooks/THE GUARDIAN

The films of Tim Burton are not so much released as laid on, staged and mounted like lavish masked balls. The interiors are opulent and the tables piled high with all manner of intoxicating delicacies to eat and drink. With Alice in Wonderland, the director may well have outdone himself.

Burton's latest pitches its heroine headfirst on a return trip down the rabbit-hole. At the bottom, Alice runs across murderers, madmen and dragons, but proceeds to treat them all with the same wry acceptance, reasoning this is her dream so she can therefore behave as she pleases. It is an attitude that Burton clearly approves of. The books of Lewis Carroll may have provided his underpinning and inspiration, but he sets about Wonderland with a giddy irreverence. It is his film and he can do what he likes.

Newcomer Mia Wasikowska (a dead ringer for the young Gwyneth Paltrow) plays our lissome Victorian heroine, now nudging 20, who returns to wrest Wonderland from the clutches of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and deliver it back to the White one (Anne Hathaway). Along the way, she meets her old forgotten friends, who initially fear they may have been landed with an impostor ("the Wrong Alice"). If the plot sounds like a rehash of Steven Spielberg's Hook (in which Robin Williams played a middle-aged Peter Pan), rest assured that the similarities are merely cosmetic. Alice in Wonderland is lighter and more playful, juggling its themes of fairytale good and evil until the colours blur.

If anything, Burton appears more enamoured of his turbulent supporting characters than the insipidly beautiful Alice. Johnny Depp gives a lively performance as the cracked and clownish Mad Hatter, while Bonham Carter's Red Queen proves a strident, capricious delight. Staring imperiously from an oversized, computer-generated head, the queen manages the unlikely feat of being at once utterly grotesque and alarmingly sexy.

Alice in Wonderland whisks 3D live action with animation, antique storybook illustrations with the aesthetics of an 80s goth video. Does it amount to anything more than a dizzy whirl? Well, possibly not. Here is a film in which the art direction eats the magic cake and swells to giant proportions, while the script drinks from the magic vial and shrinks away to insignificance. But no one ever looked to Burton for nuanced human drama and stately character development. Instead, we turn to him for flamboyance, spectacle and a benign whiff of madness. Alice in Wonderland provides all that in abundance. It is a glorious feast for the senses that fades away when the credits roll, leaving barely the trace of a hangover.

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By Kate Muir/The London Times

Never have toves been so slithy or a film so brillig. Tim Burton’s spectacular reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, which has its royal premiere in London tonight, takes Lewis Carroll’s famous Jabberwocky poem and makes it a 3D - epic for the next generation.

Traditionalists may quibble with Burton’s gothic ride through the Alice books, but his hallucinogenic humour is true to the originals. Plus, you don’t get a cast any better than this. The standouts are Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen with a bulbous head and a venomous tongue, using a live pig as a footstool, and Alice herself, played by the Australian actress Mia Wasikowska with frowning confidence, and not a drop of soppiness.

The characters may be familiar but the plot deviates insanely from the original. Down the rabbit hole, Alice still finds the "Drink Me" potion and varies from six inches to 20ft tall, attends the Mad Hatter's tea party and confronts the Red Queen, but Burton brings Alice's dream closer to his more-favoured nightmares.

Each scene offers a British luvvie in phantasmagorial disguise. Alan Rickman voices the caterpillar, and perhaps inevitably the Cheshire Cat speaks with the smug voice of Stephen Fry. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are a digitally-manipulated Matt Lucas, and Paul Whitehouse is the disturbed March Hare, prone to throwing crockery. And the squeaky dormouse, who pokes out the Bandersnatch’s eyeball with a needle, is our very own Barbara Windsor.

Unfortunately Johnny Depp has too much of Willy Wonka lingering about him as he plays the Mad Hatter, who is promoted to a modern buddy role with Alice. His madness, perhaps induced like his red hair by mercury once used by hatters, is indicated by his breaking into a gruff Scottish accent. Anne Hathaway’s character as the White Queen was, said Burton, based on Nigella Lawson. This running joke becomes clear in the lipsmacking potion scene.

The creepy fantasy landscapes and kooky costumes have gestated brilliantly on Burton’s famous drawing board, but 3D effects superimposed after filming seem unnecessary. The miraculous beasts and lurid tropical flowers could have come from Avatar.

Carroll probably never saw Alice as an action-adventure movie with huge battle scenes between red and white armies. Yet John Tenniel’s original illustrations percolate through the film, and the Jabberwock is a near facsimile - except its eyes light up.

The Frumious Bandersnatch is more worrying. No longer worth shunning, the beast has been turned by Disney’s Imagineers and into a cute, growly brown-spotted monster. Ditto the Cheshire cat, who resembles a grubby Garfield, no doubt next to be seen in ToysRus.

Commercial considerations have also made Alice 19 years old, for the all-important teen market. Burton lets her break the Victorian mould and become an empowering, feminist figure as she puts on some Joan of Arc armour, grabs the vorpal sword, and roars “off with your head” at the Jabberwock. In all, a fantastic film that gets curiouser and curiouser.

‘Avatar’ Faces Traffic Jam at 3-D Screens (The New York Times)

January 30, 2010

By MICHAEL CIEPLY and BROOKS BARNES

LOS ANGELES — Will it soon be time for 20th Century Fox’s “Avatar” to surrender the 3-D stage? Walt Disney Studios certainly thinks so.

“Alice in Wonderland,” a 3-D adaptation from Tim Burton and Disney, is set to replace “Avatar” in all commercial Imax theaters and in many multiplexes that operate 3-D screens on March 5.

The problem is that “Avatar” is still playing like gangbusters — especially in 3-D theaters, which charge premium prices for tickets and have been instrumental in making “Avatar” a box office phenomenon — and exhibitors are grumbling at having to let go of a sure winner to pick up an uncertain new prospect.

Fox executives are now quietly talking about fighting to hold some of the big-format screens for “Avatar,” perhaps by giving more favorable financial terms to theater owners who keep it. Disney is set to take over the 3-D real estate just two days before the Academy Awards, a situation that would make it hard for “Avatar” — a front-runner for best picture — to get the traditional Oscar box office bump.

A similar showdown is brewing between, on the one side, DreamWorks Animation and Paramount Pictures, which plan to release the animated “How to Train Your Dragon” in 3-D on March 26, and, on the other side, Warner Brothers. Warner has just decided to convert its sword-and-sandals fantasy “Clash of the Titans” to a 3-D format and release it on April 2. “How to Train Your Dragon” will have to make do with fewer 3-D seats, which sell for a $3 to $5 premium.

The 3-D bottleneck is likely to grow worse. Michael Lewis, the chief executive of RealD, which equips theaters that account for about 90 percent of 3D screens in the United States, said about 60 films were set for 3-D release over the next three years.

“As audiences experience more 3-D movies, scheduling challenges for theater owners and studios will naturally increase while there is a temporary shortfall of 3-D screens,” Chuck Viane, Disney’s president for distribution, said in a statement. Another Disney executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment, said the studio did not see “Avatar” as a problem because early interest in “Alice in Wonderland” was quite strong.

“It will beautifully draft off of ‘Avatar,’ ” the executive said.

Fox, Imax and DreamWorks Animation declined to comment. Spokesmen for the Cinemark and AMC theater chains, which operate 3-D screens, did not return telephone calls. A spokesman for the Regal chain had no comment.

Imax long ago promised almost all of its 179 domestic and 82 foreign theaters to Disney for the opening of “Alice in Wonderland,” which stars Johnny Depp. At the time, few suspected that “Avatar” would still be racking up ticket sales that have made it the best-selling film in history, with more than $1.9 billion at the worldwide box office so far. In fact, the flagship Imax theaters in places like the AMC Loews Lincoln Square in Manhattan are still selling out weekend shows with no sign of a slowdown. More than 70 percent of ticket revenue for “Avatar” has come from 3-D.

The owners of Imax’s commercial theaters appear to be bound by their commitment to Disney — although contracts have often meant less in the world of movie exhibition than pragmatic decisions based on the leverage of the players involved. Under pressure from Fox, for instance, Imax might well ask Disney to permit the large-screen theaters to hang onto “Avatar” for midnight screenings during the three-week run promised to “Alice in Wonderland,” according to one executive who was briefed on the situation but spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid further conflict. Another possibility might be to re-release “Avatar” in the large-screen format sometime later this year.

Disney could have a harder time maintaining its anticipated number of 3-D screens that are not Imax. Decisions about what movies play on those screens are generally made on the local or regional level, based on how well tickets are selling. Given the staying power of “Avatar,” theater owners are speculating that it could monopolize 3-D screens into April. The number of tickets sold for “Avatar” is thus far about the same as that for “Titanic” over the same length of time. “Titanic” ran for nine months after its release in 1997.

The collisions among movie studios for 3-D theaters stems from a shortage of screens equipped with the technology. By year’s end the number of 3-D screens in the United States will have expanded to about 5,100, according to the National Association of Theater Owners. But that is still too few to accommodate dozens of big-budget movies released in the format. Mr. Lewis said his company had contracts to install an additional 5,000 screens worldwide. But much of the expansion, he said, has been waiting for a loosening of capital markets.

Eventually, multiplexes that now operate one or two 3-D screens will have five or six. “By the end of the year, I think it’s going to be a nonissue,” Mr. Lewis said of the shortage.

"Alicia en el país de las maravillas", de Tim Burton (Strange World)

"Alicia en el país de las maravillas", de Tim Burton (nuevo trailer)

"Alice in Wonderland", de Tim Burton (nuevo poster)

clickeen y se agranda, obvio...

Trailer Trash: "Invictus", "Green Zone", "Alice in Wonderland", "Shutter Island"

Alice in Wonderland - Extended Trailer

"Alicia en el país de las maravillas", de Tim Burton (nueva foto)

Para los que ven (o vieron) la primera temporada de la serie "In Treatment", la actriz que encarna a Alicia es la "paciente de los miércoles" del terapeuta que interpreta Gabriel Byrne.

Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" (trailer)

"Alice in Wonderland", de Tim Burton

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First Look: Tim Burton's 'Alice in Wonderland' (USA Today)

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