Monday, June 22, 2009

Burtonland

Tim B's vision of the Lewis Carroll book will be in a multiplex near you nine months from now:.

... The film will be a spectacular combination of CG animation and motion capture and 3-D effects, quite fitting for the wonderland Burton has re-imagined ...

A Burton favorite, Johnny Depp is the eccentric and over-the-top Mad Hatter .... In addition to Depp, the film stars Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen and Anne Hathaway as the White Queen ...

I'm so old I can remember when Tim was fresh out of school designing characters down on the first floor of the old Disney animation building ... and getting ignored by Disney management.

5 comments:

robiscus said...

Another remake by Tim Burton with Johnny Depp???

Snooze. Snore.

Anonymous said...

Interesting. The Red and White Queens are from Through the Looking Glass, not Alice in Wonderland. So...this film adapts both books?

Anonymous said...

Whoops -- I should have read the full story, first. Definitely not an adaptation or a remake.

My 2 Cents said...

Remake away, Tim. After all the unsuccessful attempts to film, animate or stage Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass I'm convinced that these pieces are unfilmable. They belong to literature, period. Much of the charm of the story is in the language, the style of the narrative, especially Alice. Probably the best way to do it would be to have a really great actor simply narrate the story word for word with an occasional break for dialog.

Actually, the Disney version was pretty good, it has gotten a bad rap over the years. If they took out the tedious songs and slapstick sound effects, it would have been considered to be among the best Disney features.

Anonymous said...

"Probably the best way to do it would be to have a really great actor simply narrate the story word for word with an occasional break for dialog"

Cyril Ritchard (british actor who was famed among other things for his stage performance of Captain Hook in "Peter Pan")did exactly that, reading several chapters for an LP that I played the heck out of as a child. He did it brilliantly and I agree that it's really the only proper way to do Lewis Carroll's Alice. They ARE simply too much of the printed page/written for the ear to hear aloud. That said, I also loved the Disney Alice--especially the songs, which are charming and fin at their best and in a couple of places, also quite beautiful. While it didn't work overall it's hardly the dismal failure some paint it.

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