Saturday Review #15
Nov. 28th, 2010 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jennariaSlightly belated, or really belated if you count the skipped week. On the bright side, I'm not behind on NaNo any more!
ALICE IN WONDERLAND, directed by Tim Burton.
Cover copy: Tumble down the rabbit hole with Alice for a fantastical adventure from Walt Disney Pictures and Tim Burton. Inviting and magical, ALICE IN WONDERLAND is an imaginative new twist on one of the most beloved stories of all time. Alice (Mia Wasikowska), now 19 years old, returns to the whimsical world she first entered as a child and embarks on a journey to discover her true destiny. This Wonderland is a world beyond your imagination and unlike anything you've seen before. The extraordinary charcters you've loved come to life richer and more colorful than ever. There's the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), and more. A triumphant cinematic experience - ALICE IN WONDERLAND is an incredible feast for your eyes, ears and heart that will captivate audiences of all sizes.
Oh, lord and gravy. Dear Disney DVD cover writers: dial it back a bit already.
First of all: this is not 'unlike anything you've seen before.' If you've seen any Tim Burton film whatsoever, you've seen the like. The details may be different, but the style is unmistakable. This isn't a bad thing, at least to me. I like Tim Burton and his visual style. But it's a thing to be considered.
Second of all: about that 'journey to discover her true destiny.'
The movie's plot is your basic bildungsroman, Coming Into Your True Self/Power variant (as opposed to straight-up Coming Of Age variant). What this means, of course, is that Alice's life starts out not very good, she gets the Call To Adventure in the form of the White Rabbit, she Resists The Call...it's all very Joseph Campbellian Hero's Myth formulaic, and not all the dangling of Johnny Depp in front of me is going to change the dullness of that formula. But then things go wrong, and Alice wakes up and starts making choices, and it's like the movie wakes up with her.
I like bildungsroman. I like stories where the main character gets pushed, and pushed, and maybe it's by growing up and maybe it's by teachers and maybe it's by circumstance, or maybe it's a combination of all three, but I love that moment where the main character steps up and Does Things, things that they've chosen to do. I managed to wait through nearly an entire disc's worth of episodes of THE TWELVE KINGDOMS for the heroine to stop flailing around in a useless panic and start acting already: I could certainly wait twenty minutes. But still, there's the truth of it: the movie doesn't catch fire until Alice does.
Once it's figured out where it's going, and decides that it is indeed going there, it's quite good. It's not faithful to the original, but it gets away with it by openly admitting it's not quite the same (in much the same way that the Star Trek reboot got away with a lot by openly making itself an AU). Alice was a child then, it says, and the land itself was more innocent. And even with the Hero's Myth pastede on yay, the story still manages some degree of subtlety. The Red Queen has a point in her grudge against her sister: it's not just an unreasonable hatred. The White Queen holds her hands in front of her as if she were a praying mantis, and the one of the few times we really see her touching things normally is when she is concocting a potion for Alice involving such ingredients as dead men's fingers (buttered, of course). And the much-advertised Hatter is indeed Mad, although it's occasionally difficult to tell how much of that is PTSD, how much mercury, and how much an inadvertent seep-through of Captain Jack Sparrow.
(Tangenting for a moment: no, seriously, I get what they were thinking - 'It's Johnny Depp! That'll bring all the fangirls in!' But at the end of the day, he isn't nearly as key a character as they'd like you to believe, by which I mean he isn't the other main character. There isn't a second main character. It's Alice's show all the way. I personally don't mind this - a strong female main character who isn't defined by her relationship to a man? bring it on! - but I do wonder if the reason the movie didn't do as well as hoped at the box office is because of the bait-and-switch, trailer-wise.)
Best of all, they don't chicken out on the ending. Not in the sense that Alice makes the choice that you always pretty much knew she'd make: that's just formula. In the sense that it takes the whole point of the Coming Of Age arc and follows through on it. There's no half-hearted 'and it was just a dream!', like you find in the original (which admittedly has no truck with bildungsroman whatsoever), or in the otherwise excellent MIRRORMASK; no 'and she put aside Pointless Dreams' (as implied in LABYRINTH); no 'and she had gained confidence in herself' (SPIRITED AWAY).* Alice has not merely gained confidence in herself and her perception of the world: she takes action on that perception. She refuses to revert back to sweetly passive. For that alone, it gets massive props from me.
So, in conclusion: formulaic coming of age story that still manages to be more than the sum of its parts, and I don't just mean because Johnny Depp is on the screen. Sorry, guys: even on the shallow hormonal level, given the choice between the Hatter, and Alice in armor, I'm there with Alice every time. Rowr.
*I am certainly not intending to imply that these are the only messages that the movies in question contain. SPIRITED AWAY in particular is more complicated than that. On the other hand, SPIRITED AWAY also takes away the heroine's memory of her time in the spirit world and the lessons learned there, so whatever messages about growing up and into oneself it contains are decidedly mixed.
ALICE IN WONDERLAND, directed by Tim Burton.
Cover copy: Tumble down the rabbit hole with Alice for a fantastical adventure from Walt Disney Pictures and Tim Burton. Inviting and magical, ALICE IN WONDERLAND is an imaginative new twist on one of the most beloved stories of all time. Alice (Mia Wasikowska), now 19 years old, returns to the whimsical world she first entered as a child and embarks on a journey to discover her true destiny. This Wonderland is a world beyond your imagination and unlike anything you've seen before. The extraordinary charcters you've loved come to life richer and more colorful than ever. There's the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), and more. A triumphant cinematic experience - ALICE IN WONDERLAND is an incredible feast for your eyes, ears and heart that will captivate audiences of all sizes.
Oh, lord and gravy. Dear Disney DVD cover writers: dial it back a bit already.
First of all: this is not 'unlike anything you've seen before.' If you've seen any Tim Burton film whatsoever, you've seen the like. The details may be different, but the style is unmistakable. This isn't a bad thing, at least to me. I like Tim Burton and his visual style. But it's a thing to be considered.
Second of all: about that 'journey to discover her true destiny.'
The movie's plot is your basic bildungsroman, Coming Into Your True Self/Power variant (as opposed to straight-up Coming Of Age variant). What this means, of course, is that Alice's life starts out not very good, she gets the Call To Adventure in the form of the White Rabbit, she Resists The Call...it's all very Joseph Campbellian Hero's Myth formulaic, and not all the dangling of Johnny Depp in front of me is going to change the dullness of that formula. But then things go wrong, and Alice wakes up and starts making choices, and it's like the movie wakes up with her.
I like bildungsroman. I like stories where the main character gets pushed, and pushed, and maybe it's by growing up and maybe it's by teachers and maybe it's by circumstance, or maybe it's a combination of all three, but I love that moment where the main character steps up and Does Things, things that they've chosen to do. I managed to wait through nearly an entire disc's worth of episodes of THE TWELVE KINGDOMS for the heroine to stop flailing around in a useless panic and start acting already: I could certainly wait twenty minutes. But still, there's the truth of it: the movie doesn't catch fire until Alice does.
Once it's figured out where it's going, and decides that it is indeed going there, it's quite good. It's not faithful to the original, but it gets away with it by openly admitting it's not quite the same (in much the same way that the Star Trek reboot got away with a lot by openly making itself an AU). Alice was a child then, it says, and the land itself was more innocent. And even with the Hero's Myth pastede on yay, the story still manages some degree of subtlety. The Red Queen has a point in her grudge against her sister: it's not just an unreasonable hatred. The White Queen holds her hands in front of her as if she were a praying mantis, and the one of the few times we really see her touching things normally is when she is concocting a potion for Alice involving such ingredients as dead men's fingers (buttered, of course). And the much-advertised Hatter is indeed Mad, although it's occasionally difficult to tell how much of that is PTSD, how much mercury, and how much an inadvertent seep-through of Captain Jack Sparrow.
(Tangenting for a moment: no, seriously, I get what they were thinking - 'It's Johnny Depp! That'll bring all the fangirls in!' But at the end of the day, he isn't nearly as key a character as they'd like you to believe, by which I mean he isn't the other main character. There isn't a second main character. It's Alice's show all the way. I personally don't mind this - a strong female main character who isn't defined by her relationship to a man? bring it on! - but I do wonder if the reason the movie didn't do as well as hoped at the box office is because of the bait-and-switch, trailer-wise.)
Best of all, they don't chicken out on the ending. Not in the sense that Alice makes the choice that you always pretty much knew she'd make: that's just formula. In the sense that it takes the whole point of the Coming Of Age arc and follows through on it. There's no half-hearted 'and it was just a dream!', like you find in the original (which admittedly has no truck with bildungsroman whatsoever), or in the otherwise excellent MIRRORMASK; no 'and she put aside Pointless Dreams' (as implied in LABYRINTH); no 'and she had gained confidence in herself' (SPIRITED AWAY).* Alice has not merely gained confidence in herself and her perception of the world: she takes action on that perception. She refuses to revert back to sweetly passive. For that alone, it gets massive props from me.
So, in conclusion: formulaic coming of age story that still manages to be more than the sum of its parts, and I don't just mean because Johnny Depp is on the screen. Sorry, guys: even on the shallow hormonal level, given the choice between the Hatter, and Alice in armor, I'm there with Alice every time. Rowr.
*I am certainly not intending to imply that these are the only messages that the movies in question contain. SPIRITED AWAY in particular is more complicated than that. On the other hand, SPIRITED AWAY also takes away the heroine's memory of her time in the spirit world and the lessons learned there, so whatever messages about growing up and into oneself it contains are decidedly mixed.