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Through Tim Burton’s Looking Glass
By Mark Salisbury
Disney twenty-three visits with the producer of The Nightmare Before Christmas and gets an exclusive look at his new Wonderland, arriving in theaters in 2010.
Originally published in 1865, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, written by Charles Dodgson under the nom de plume Lewis Carroll, was an immediate sensation and forever changed the course of children’s literature. For starters, it featured the first literary journey into a fantastical land. Perhaps more importantly, it was written from a child’s perspective, with Alice given the freedom to question the ways of the world, particularly the often ineffectual adult figures she encounters in Wonderland. Highly influential and hugely popular, it has never been out of print. And six years after first being published, it begat a sequel, Through The Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. Both volumes have since proven inspirational for stage, television, and film adaptations, most famously Disney’s much-loved 1951 animated feature, whose image of the blonde-haired Alice wearing a blue dress and a white pinafore remains an indelible one. Alice’s appeal arguably owes much to the work of illustrators such as John Tenniel, whose iconic, original line drawings first brought Carroll’s Wonderland and its menagerie of characters to life. The unique and the wonderful included the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Red and White Queens, the Jabberwocky, and a host of others.
“It’s so much a part of the culture,” director Tim Burton tells Disney twenty-three on a bright mid-January afternoon in his London office. He’s currently in post—production on his latest move, Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, British comedian Matt Lucas as rotund twins Tweedledee and Tweedledum, Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, and newcomer Mia Wasikowska as Alice.
Tim is sitting in his cavernous study in a house that was designed and once owned by Arthur Rackham, a famous 19th-century English illustrator. Rackham’s haunting, fairy tale-like drawings for the Alice stories have been a source of inspiration for the director, who continues: “Whether or not you know the story, you know certain images or have certain ideas about it. It somehow taps into that subconscious thing. That’s why all those great stories stay around, because they tap into things people probably aren’t even aware of on a conscious level. That’s why there’ve been so many versions of it; it captures people’s minds. But as a movie, I’ve never seen a version I’ve really liked.”
But he confesses a fondness for the 1933 film version, a rarely see, black-and-white curio that features W.C. Fields, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper (“that’s probably the best one because it’s the weirdest one”), as well as Dreamchild, Dennis Potter’s 1985 twisted take on the tale. That one stars Coral Browne as an elderly Alice Liddell (real-life inspiration for the fictional Alice), who is haunted by creatures from the book.
For Tim, director of Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, who began his career as an animator at Disney in 1979, Carroll’s topsy-turvy world with its mix of fantasy and reality is perfect material. Working from a script by Linda Woolverton, whose credits include Disney’s The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, Tim’s Alice has more purpose and mettle than hitherto seen, 17 years old, a girl on the cusp of womanhood whose journey through Wonderland becomes a rite of passage as she discovers her voice and herself, eventually reconnecting with her late father.
“What I liked about this take on the story is that she is at an age where you’re kind of between a kid and an adult,” Tim says. “And like a lot of young people, they feel like they have very old souls, a certain kind of oldness in their soul that doesn’t make them so popular in their own culture and their own time. The idea is that Alice is somebody who doesn’t quite fit into Victorian society and structure. She’s more internal, which a lot of people are. A lot of kids are quite old in their souls for their age.” And that’s exactly what Tim found in 19-year-old Australian-born Mia Wasikowska, whom he cast as his Alice after an extensive search. “We met a lot of people, but she just had that certain kind of emotional roughness, standing her ground in a way that makes her kind of an older person but with a younger person’s mentality.”
While Linda Woolverton’s script incorporates narrative elements and characters both “human” and otherwise from Carroll’s books, Tim’s film is, in essence, a new story. “It’s not a literal retelling of those particular stories although there are elements of it,” the director reveals.
As one of contemporary cinema’s greatest visionaries, Tim has a take on Wonderland and its inhabitants that is extraordinary and inimitable. “The goal was to make it kind of classic but also make it look new, because there are many variations of illustrators – Rackham, Tenniel – and historically there are lots of images, all slightly different. I wanted to make these feel different and kind of give it a slightly more…not modern, but just give it its own feel, something classic, but so you were looking at new images as well.”
Certainly, his interpretation reflects the books’ nature, as well as the magical, fairy tale quality of Rackham’s illustrations. “The story and imagery does have edge to it,” Tim notes. “Whatever you do with the Mad Hatter, he’s a slightly disturbed character, as all of them are. The weird cat smiling down at you. The Red Queen…
“Everybody’s got an image of Wonderland, such as the Disney version which is bright and cartoony,” he continues. “I think in people’s minds, it’s always a very bright place. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but we thought given what this story is, if Alice had this adventure as a little girl and now she’s going back all these years later, it’s a bit overgrown, the topiaries aren’t as nicely cut as they once were. There’s a slightly haunted quality to Wonderland, even though it’s got strong elements of color.”
This vision is being brought to the screen using a unique combination of techniques, incorporating live actors, motion capture, fully animated CG characters, and CG environments. “The way it’s being done is a mutation of things,” says Tim, who filmed for two weeks on location in Cornwall, England, before moving to Los Angeles’ Culver City Studios where he shot his actors on soundstages completely surrounded by green screen. “It’s not like Beowulf. It’s not a motion-capture movie. “It’s kind of a mixture of some distorted live action and animation. I can’t relate it to anything because I’m not sure what to relate it to. It’s kind of new territory for me, so we’ll see.”
Everyone and everything in Tim Burton’s Wonderland, apart from Mia Wasikowska’s Alice, will be enhanced to varying degrees using some kind of effect or else totally created in the computer. “Because you have live-action characters and you have animated characters, I wanted to blur the line a little bit more,” Tim says. And it will be in 3D too, a fact Tim is extremely excited about and which, he says, was one of the selling points of the project. “It seemed like the right kind of story to do 3D without getting too gimmicky with it. It felt right, the mixture of medium and the material. I have no idea how it’s going to [turn out]. I have seen one 3D test, so far, one 3D shot.”
With more than a year until Alice in Wonderland is released in theaters, there is much work to do, many decisions yet to be made, with ideas and concepts continually changing and evolving. For now, Tim is readying a rough assemblage of the live-action footage so Sony Imageworks, which is handling all the effects, can begin layering in their work. “Now it kind of turns into an animated film,” he says, “so I’m editing, doing storyboards to stick in, trying to create an animatic kind of thing, doing some more pre-visualization. I’ll be turning over footage, so we can start to see stuff, see where we’re at.”
He looks at the concept art that’s lying on his desk and pinned to the walls of his office, aware that, much like Alice herself, he’s embarking on an exhilarating journey of his own.
From the premiere issue of Disney twenty-three, Spring 2009
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It's so purty!
Anyway, here's the website where I found the description of the article.
