Tim Burton’s Disney adaptation of Alice In Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, looked like it would be a recipe for success ― and indeed, it blew Burton’s other movies out of the water by bringing in more than $1 billion at the box office. However, despite cashing in commercially, Alice In Wonderland scored a “rotten” Rotten Tomatoes score and received mixed reviews. The movie’s stellar cast and intriguingly dark spin on a fantasy classic drew in huge numbers of viewers at the time, yet it didn’t make much of a cultural impact and isn’t largely remembered as one of Disney or Burton’s best.
Alice In Wonderland follows protagonist Alice after she tumbles down a rabbit hole while chasing the White Rabbit and finds herself in an absurd and unsettling world populated by animals and playing card characters. In 2010’s version, this realm is called Underland, rather than Wonderland, as director Burton created a darker take on the Lewis Carroll children’s novel and the 1951 Disney animated classic. The second-highest-grossing film of 2010, Alice In Wonderland kickstarted Disney’s live-action era and gave Tim Burton his first $1 billion movie ― but its reception showed that box office numbers don’t always reflect a movie’s quality.
Burton’s Alice In Wonderland Was A Recipe For (Commercial) Success
It was no surprise that Alice In Wonderland was a hit for Disney. The 1951 animation is one of the most recognizable Disney classics, its characters ingrained in pop culture. The White Rabbit, for instance, has become a symbol for following your curiosity, used in media from Jefferson Airplane’s songs to The Matrix. The 2010 cast of Alice In Wonderland is almost as recognizable as the characters, too. While Mia Wasikowska, playing Alice, wasn’t a huge name, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway took starring roles. The list of voice actors in animated roles included Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, and even Christopher Lee.
Known for his gothic, Victorian-tinged, and weird twists on stories, director Tim Burton also seemed a genius pick to take on a new Alice In Wonderland film. By 2010, he was fresh off the stop-motion animation Corpse Bride and musical Sweeney Todd, also starring frequent Burton collaborators Depp and Bonham Carter ― and had proved his deftness for fresh spins on children’s films with his 2005 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Disney’s 1951 Alice In Wonderland animation and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland were already full of oddities and an absurdist sensibility that would suit Burton.
Why Alice In Wonderland Has A “Rotten” Score
Despite this promising premise and strong cast bringing Alice In Wonderland to financial success, it still didn’t fare well critically, getting 51 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Part of this was the heavy use of CGI, creating a sterile and lifeless look that clashed with the movie’s premise and trippy plot. It was a missed opportunity for Burton to include some stop-motion or puppetry in the film, which would have heightened its off-beat, unsettling, and whimsical tone. Live-action characters were also tweaked with CGI, such as making the Red Queen’s head cartoonishly big, distracting from Helen Bonham Carter’s performance.
The plot also came in for criticism. Shoe-horning the absurdist aspects of Carroll’s book, such as the Jabberwocky nonsense poem, into a conventional story made for a confusing but often flat script. Despite the gothic set-dressing, the movie became a straightforward slay-the-dragon quest. The Guardian criticized the “pretty conventional work” and the “frictionless, whimsical world.” Some of this difficulty might have laid in Alice In Wonderland’s status as very family-friendly, staple Disney fare; Burton struggled with the same brief when adapting Dumbo. While Disney can be relied on to produce slick, often successful fantasy, perhaps the studio wasn’t right for a truly creative take on Alice In Wonderland.
Sources: Rotten Tomatoes, The Guardian
