Hi world
The Tim Burton / Disney Studio reboot of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is welcome for its decision to truly adapt the source material for the big budget movie audience.
As I left the film I wondered if, in forty years' time, the movie might well play on tv (I'm assuming tv will endure) as regularly as the Disney Studio adaptation of Mary Poppins has done. This is the third time that the Disney Studio has adapted the Alice stories. In the 1920s, Walt Disney produced a number of shorts combining live action and animation to tell Alice's adventures.
Like Avatar, the underrated A Chrisftmas Carol, and The Polar Express, Alice reinforces the fascinations of the performance capture / digitally rendered milieu that is rapidly defining the aesthetic of the big bugdet popular fantasy film. Some years ago, the point was made that film could, and would, become more like painting than photography. The lavishly rendered fantasy format has arrived at that place.
The carnivalesque quality that has always characterised Tim Burton's films finds its place in Alice, and perhaps most appropriately Tim Burton's origins in animation get the fullest workout in this film since his production The Nightmare Before Christmas.
There's something quite controlled about the narrative shape of Alice. The story doesn't sprawl and there's a clear, organised structure to it. It reminded of me that other recently produced, Disney movie, Enchanted and the Jim Henson movie, Labyrinth which, during its release in 1986 clearly stated its debt to the Alice stories. It was Steven Spielberg's Hook that came most readily to mind, though, in watching Burton's film. The character of Alice is a vintage Burton hero, reaching back to Vincent in Burton's animated short film of the same name.
Some reviews of Burton's film have observed how the film moves , unoriginally, towards a digitally rendered battle but I felt that , rightly so, the chessboard battle gets sidelined in order to focus on Alice's moment of self transformation in her showdown with ... the voice of Christopher Lee.
The otherworldly adventure that Alice undertakes ultimately impacts, and empowers, the real life that she goes on to leads.
That's what dreams are for.
JC
Reference: http://james-blueskies.blogspot.com/2010/03/alice-in-wonderland-film-review.html
No comments:
Post a Comment