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I'm waiting for Danny Elfman's music.

That looks really, really awesome. I'm surprised Burton didn't cast Helena Bonham Carter as Alice

That looks really, really awesome. I'm surprised Burton didn't cast Helena Bonham Carter as Alice

LOL!

Shes the red queen.

I am loving this movie!!! The pig thing — LMAO!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCM4JiJ6B2I

A nice interview with Anne Hathaway:

http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/02/01/new-photo-and-interview-anne-hathaway-in-alice-in-wonderland/

As usual with Burton great visuals and atmosphere... I don't have much faith about any story coherence but maybe that doesn't matter with anything based on Alice?

Why? Carroll is incoherent?

God no, but people don't read Alice for the plot or to see if she gets out of Wonderland (or the Looking Glass)--they like the odd encounters, the puns, etc. I know that's why some think movie's have never wokred with it, and why they like to add a major plot motivator like the Jabberwocky (just a poem read quickly in Looking Glass) to the action-- I mean while in other aspects it's similar to Wonderful Wizard of Oz, that has a strong, clear, plot propulsion...

even Burton is adding a sorta Labyrrinth type monster quest plot, isn't he? (of course, I know, I know, it's a *sequel* of sorts )

Edited February 13, 201015 yr by EricMontreal22

I absolutely can't wait for this movie. From the moment I found out that Helena Bonham Carter is the Queen, I was sold.

And she says OFF WITH HER HEEEEEAAAAAAD!!!!!

Edited February 4, 201015 yr by YRBB

It's getting closer!

<p>

<span style="font-size:19.5pt;"><font face="Verdana">Innocence, obsession and the making of Alice in Wonderland</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Verdana">The story has inspired porn, pop and a new Tim Burton film. But nothing is as weird as the original</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:7.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma"> Peter Ackroyd</font></b></span>

<span style="font-size:9pt;"><font face="Verdana">Central Park, New York, has a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland surrounded by the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat, the White Rabbit and the Dormouse. The image of Alice herself is 11ft in height, perhaps testifying to her strange contortions at the beginning of her adventures. It is proof, too, that the seven-year-old girl and her companions have travelled across the world. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into more than 100 languages. Perhaps it has been turned into Martian. The book has been the subject of ten operas and choral settings, appropriate for a work that contains several songs without sense. It has been adapted for 27 films, for cinema and television, the latest of which is Tim Burton’s version starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen of Hearts. It will no doubt continue the tradition of arch overacting that the text itself seems to demand. Mannerisms must be exaggerated; costumes must be outrageous.

There have been at least two pornographic films based on the story, which will satisfy those who continue to see sexual secrets in the inhabitants of Wonderland. Many films, such as The Matrix and Resident Evil, borrow from elements of the Alice story. Salvador Dalí finished 12 illustrations inspired by Alice, and of course there are some who believe that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the true origin of surrealism.

The first theatrical version was produced in 1886, and there have been countless dramas of Alice since. There is a certain justice to this since Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) was a great frequenter of the mid-Victorian theatre, as a study of the court of his Queen of Hearts reveals. Alice has inspired many novelists, from Nabokov to Joyce. The influence on Joyce is clear, and it may be that Nabokov’s Lolita is soul sister to the little girl.

Alice has also affected contemporary musicians, from the Beatles to Jefferson Airplane, from Erasure to Aerosmith. The television series Lost made its obeisance to Lewis Carroll. An episode of Star Trek was devoted to his story. Yet enough is enough. It would try anyone’s patience to list the adaptations, retellings, prequels, sequels, video and computer games devoted to Alice’s adventures. There is room for one other derivative. A neurological complaint has been named as Alice in Wonderland syndrome; it entails the misperception of objects as smaller or larger than they really are.

It all began on the “golden afternoon” of July 4, 1862, when Dodgson rowed three little girls along the Thames from Oxford to Godstow. “Tell us a story,” one of the little girls, Alice Liddell, demanded. So it began. Alice fell down the rabbit hole, just like the holes they could see beside the banks of the river. Alice Liddell recalled in later years that Dodgson “had transported us into Fairyland”. She continually begged him to write down the adventures of her namesake. Two and a half years later he presented her with a complete manuscript bound in green leather.

He was persuaded to submit it to a publisher, and the book was issued in 1865; Dodgson used a pen-name, Lewis Carroll, that he had previously employed for the publication of some of his poetry. The illustrations by John Tenniel, with all their oddity and bravura, entirely complemented the text. Alice had entered the world. The book was widely and favourably reviewed, with the result that its sales rose ever higher. It has never been out of print.

At the age of 13 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson already had a genius for writing limericks, but his sharp and lively mind was first exercised in mathematics, at which he excelled at school and university. His rise through the ranks of Victorian academia was swift and assured; he spent his mature life (if maturity had anything to do with it) as a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church, Oxford. It is reported that Queen Victoria was so taken by Alice that she asked him to dedicate his next book to her; eventually she was presented with a treatise on algebra. Dodgson also wrote books on changes in the voting system and on the rules of lawn tennis. He loved games and puzzles of every kind. He composed more than 100,000 letters, and invented a machine called a Nyctograph that allowed him to write in the dark without having to get out of bed and strike a light. In his energy and in his industry, he was very much a man of his time.

He was tall and pale, with delicate and almost feminine features. He had a stammer, and was deaf in one ear. The stammer helped him to create an alter ego for himself in Alice as the Dodo; Do-Do was the effect of hearing him try to pronounce his surname. He wore clerical black, except when he was boating, and acquired a reputation for being somewhat formal and precise. He did not like to be confused with his nom de plume. Letters addressed to “Lewis Carroll, Christ Church” were returned, unopened, to the Oxford post office.

Yet he delighted in the company of small girls, particularly that of the three Liddell sisters, who were the daughters of the Dean of Christ Church. And Alice was the favourite. He became, perhaps, too enamoured of her. For some reason there was a brief cessation of relations between Dodgson and the Liddell family. “I held aloof from them,” he wrote in his diary, “as I have done all this term.” There would have been no overt indecency, or even the suggestion of such a thing. He was a Victorian gentleman. It has been surmised, however, that Dodgson proposed a future marriage to the 11-year-old Alice; this might have been considered inappropriate, although a 20-year difference in age between male and female was not uncommon in the period.

In any case there were always other little girls. He met them in the homes of friends; he met them in railway carriages as they travelled with their parents. When he became their dear companion, he would invite them to tea or take them on expeditions; he would accompany them on long walks or invite them to the theatre — all with the willing consent of the parents, who never saw or professed to see anything in the least reprehensible about Dodgson’s interest. Nor, necessarily, was there. He genuinely loved children and sought their company; they were at the centre of his life.

And then there are the photographs. He was an avid enthusiast for the new art, and took most delight in photographing the young girls of his acquaintance. Furthermore he liked to picture them naked, an activity that would in these times lead to a police prosecution. The parents of the children, however, gave their consent and were present at the time. It was for them a blameless activity, and involved a charming motif of the new art. Had not Titian and Botticelli painted nude children in large numbers?

There are other explanations for his interest. He shared the intense Romantic passion for childhood and purity. He read the poetry of William Blake with enthusiasm, and delighted in the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge. He knew whole passages of Dickens by heart and seems to have shared the novelist’s conviction that the innocence of the young was being destroyed by Victorian civilisation. We may think of Little Nell. He may have enjoyed the company of children for a more pressing personal reason. In their company he lost his stammer, and enjoyed the freedom of fluent discourse. That he told the story of Alice to the Liddell girls while boating on the Thames may account for the sense of delight and possibility that irradiates the narrative.

Yet, in the end, it seems overwhelmingly likely that he was sexually attracted to young girls, with his furtive desires sublimated in a general admiration for their spontaneity and innocence. “Anyone that has ever loved one true child,” he wrote in a preface to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “will have known the awe that falls on one in the presence of a spirit fresh from God’s hands.” He never acted on his impulses, but strove to repress or ignore them. There was no sin; there was only guilt. He was beset by what he called “anxious thoughts” and “unholy thoughts”. “Oh God,” he wrote, “who has given me the will to pray, give me also Thy Holy Spirit to cleanse and sanctify me.” There can be no doubt that he suffered immensely from some private source of woe. Somewhere in that suffering is the seed of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

It would take years of work, however, to discover it. “If there’s no meaning in it,” the King of Hearts says, “that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn’t try to find any.” Yet a book without any overt meaning is bound to have meanings imposed upon it. That is why the book has been given a Jungian interpretation, and a Freudian interpretation. It has been claimed that Alice, with her numerous expansions and retractions, is a version of the male penis. Going down the rabbit hole, therefore, has obvious connotations. The book was banned by a high school in New Hampshire in part because of its “references to masturbation and sexual fantasies”. There is in fact sensuality, rather than sexuality, in Alice, with all its sneezings and beatings, its writhing flamingos and delectable oysters.

It has also been seen, for example, as an allegorical account of the Wars of the Roses. Some have found the origin of Alice in Dodgson’s mathematical speculations. Mathematical patterns are pure and self-contained, after all, divorced from any observable reality. Dodgson wrote an essay on logical theory, and called it What the Tortoise said to Achilles. It is hard not to be reminded of the Mock Turtle. “We called him Tortoise because he taught us.”

Yet it is essentially a work of pure and unmotivated fiction. Literature for children had previously been largely sanctimonious and dogmatic. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the subsequent Through the Looking Glass, are the first comical books for children full of absurdity and puns. If a book has no meaning, then it need not have any morals. “I can’t tell you just now what the moral is,” remarks the Duchess, “but I shall remember it in a bit.” Her memory, however, fails her.

Alice is filled with parodies, of nursery rhyme, popular ballads and divine songs, thus upholding the tradition of English nonsense that has no place in university studies but has always been a particular part of the national genius. It includes the mockheroic and the fantastical in an effort to combat seriousness and call into question any grand or general statement. In certain respects Alice is close to pantomime and, in others, it resembles Anglo-Saxon riddles. The March Hare and the White Rabbit derive from medieval “babooneries” in which animals engage in human activities.

And, in Alice herself, for the first time the child becomes the hero. “I was never so ordered about before,” she thinks, after being introduced to the Gryphon, “in all my life, never!” But she fights back. She was “always ready for a little argument”. She interrupts the “adults”; she questions and contradicts them. This is Dodgson’s great contribution to children’s literature, where the child is essentially more powerful than anyone else. It is in many respects a blissfully anarchic story. Although it contains a model of the Victorian world, with all its formality, hierarchy, defensiveness and conscious rectitude, the book is also filled with sarcasm and violence. Nonsense punctures pomposity. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the greatest feat of nonsense in the English language. And Alice remains the most famous little girl in the world.

Alice in Wonderland opens on March 5. Curiouser and Curiouser: The Genius of Alice In Wonderland is at the British Library, boxoffice.bl.uk

Lewis Carroll’s Diaries, edited by Edward Wakeling, is published by the Lewis Carroll Society

‘A nice-looking child’

Charles Dodgson wrote diaries throughout his life. Here he describes a typical day of errands around London, including visits to the artists Dante Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.

September 30, 1863 - “Called with Mr and Mrs Munro at Mr Rossetti’s, and saw some very lovely pictures, most of them only half finished. He was most hospitable in his offers of the use of house and garden for picture-taking, and I arranged to take my camera there on Monday, have Tuesday for friends, and on Wednesday take him and his mother and sister. Thence Mr and Mrs Munro went on to Virginia Water, and I went, first to Solomon’s, where I bought one of his pocket-barometers, then to Moxon’s to ask about the ‘Index’ (700 are sold). Then to Pickering’s where I bought Lowell, Moultrie, and De Vere’s Search after Proserpine. Then I tried to find the MacDonalds’ new house in Earl’s Place, Kensington, but failed, and so went on to Mr Holman Hunt. I found him at work on the great picture he has been at for six or seven years; an Egyptian girl carrying a wheatsheaf and surrounded by pigeons. His little nephew was in the room (the original of the ‘King of Hearts’, a child dressed up as Henry VIII) and we soon adjourned to the garden for a game of croquet, as it was getting too dark to paint. I had to leave the game in the middle to get back and dress, to go with Mr and Mrs Munro to dine with a friend of theirs, a Mr Watkin, a great railway director. The rest of the party were Mrs. Watkins, their daughter Harriet, a nice-looking child of 13 (looking 15 at least), and a Mr Lingard. I arranged before we left that Mrs. Watkin should bring her daughter to be photographed tomorrow.”</font></span>

<span style="font-size:10.5pt;"><b><font face="Tahoma">http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article7032573.ece</font></b></span></p>

I find Tim Burton to be a one trick pony. As soon as he has characters in his films that don't look like theyr'e a half-decomposed body... then I may change my opinion.

I find Tim Burton to be a one trick pony. As soon as he has characters in his films that don't look like theyr'e a half-decomposed body... then I may change my opinion.

Well, your aesthetic is well-known, no need to describe it in more detail. In that regard, this comment is expected.

Well, your aesthetic is well-known, no need to describe it in more detail. In that regard, this comment is expected.

I'm not saying he's not talented, for people who like that kind of thing. I just think he needs to show some RANGE. Incidentally, there is a PORN version of Alice in Wonderland that starred Y&R's Kristine DeBell. Strange but true.

Edited February 21, 201015 yr by alphanguy74