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Instead, he reaches deeper into his satchel of creativity and pushes the envelope, overreaching the bounds of respectable artistry into excess. If Burton had stopped with the computer-generated mischief at this point, we might've had a strong outing for Alice's ventures. Underland's quite the sight, whether for its beauty or its bleakness. This concentration on landscape follows Alice wherever she goes, from the Red Queen's construed, gothic hub of operations - one that has a moat filled with floating decapitated heads that's, in its morbidity, splendid - to the glowing trees leading up to the White Queen's celestial construct. The artistry succeeds in painting a dream-like world that's alluring, almost euphoric, to our eyes, while also spilling with a sense of malnourished joy. This take on Lewis Carroll's inspired environment explodes into a bizarre yet disheartening beauty, one that holds our attention when nothing else does Burton runs the gamut of color, from gloomy grayscale dilapidation with splashes of bold color during the tea party sequence, to sunset-drenched pathways through forests. Moreover, once she steps into the wide air of Underland, a sense of bowl-us-over whimsy takes hold of our cinematic concentration, luring us into this dreamed-up world.

We've seen these scenes before in other film adaptations, namely Disney's psychedelic '50s animation, but their realization in a live-action environment hits a deceptive balance between tangible and computer-generated foolery. Once in the waiting room to go into Wonderland Underland, she shifts in size - large, to small, and large again - in a cockamamie puzzle visualizing this is very tough, but it's believable due to ample usage of real production-design and splashes of CG-work. Her tumble down the rabbit hole dazzles with spectacle, smashingly using CG-imagery as she swirls down a vortex to the waiting room. When she arrives at the bottom, her persistent dreams of Wonderland - ones she's explored before - seem to be coming to life.Īs an infusion of Lewis Carroll's books, Alice in Wonderland has moments where Burton seems like he's going to get it right. When she discovers that this little shindig is orchestrated for their engagement that she knows nothing about, she takes a page out of her now-deceased, daring father's book and acts on crazed instincts: she jolts after a certain, familiar white rabbit into the woods and away from the stiff hoopla, arriving at a rabbit hole that she mistakenly tumbles down. Imaginative and perplexed by the world, she wonder what it'd be like to fly in the sky as birds soar above the dance area of the garden party she's attending, instead of fixing her attention on her obnoxious arranged suitor. We find Alice, played by newcomer Mia Wasikowska, now a young adult weaving through the upturned, coddled aristocrats who looks at her unkempt looks and dreaminess with disdain. Those expecting a live-action version of the '51 animation might be dissatisfied. Though Wonderland's an oddly beautiful place, and a handful of cherry-picked scenes dip into our capricious indulgence, there's not nearly enough sincere sparkle to give it all purpose. What comes out of Burton's work, a knotted mélange of hyper-inventive computer effects and stiffly unsatisfying characters, manages to burst with color and bore in the same dreary breath. Alice in Wonderland, his vision of Lewis Carroll's body of work, is a mish-mash of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and its sequel, "Through the Looking-Glass", that exists on some middle plane in the director's tonality. When Tim Burton's in his element - the melancholic verve of Edward Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd - he's an artist of the shadows that makes us appreciate glimmers of hopefulness, but when he crawls out of that hole for something with more of a vibrant slant, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, he's tongue-tied, awkwardly dreary and abandons control over his craft.