To enjoy Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, you’ll need to accept that it’s not by any stretch Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or its follow-up, Through the Looking Glass, David Edelstein says, but a fancy Hollywood hybrid:
Yes, it uses Alice’s characters and motifs, but the plot is one part C.S. Lewis to one part The Wizard of Oz. You could call it “C.S. Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Narnia with Johnny Depp as the Mad Scarecrow.”Carroll’s delicious satire of English logic and manners has been turned into an action-packed, feminist coming-of-age story. Alice, played by the Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, is a young Victorian woman of 19 facing the marriage proposal of an unattractive prig. She falls down a rabbit hole — for the second time, the first time was when she was 6 — and arrives in Wonderland — or, as the locals correct her, Underland — and no one believes she’s the same Alice. But if she is that Alice, a number of characters tell her, she has a destiny: to ride into battle on “the frabjous day” against the homicidally petulant Red Queen and her winged Jabberwock.