Alice and Johnny Depp

Zanuck mentioned that Burton would be the best person to come up with this film based on his success as an artistic director, animator and director. One can say the presence of Alice twice in wonderland was what made the movie special; that there was a bond between her and mad hatter that would lead to successive visits even though she had long left childhood. Pity the film was recognized only for costume and artistic design when it could have reaped other awards particularly acting ones.

Alice has a dream and it is repetitive enough to cause her distractions during the day. Some would say that she had gone as mad as the hatter but then children can imagine very realistically and since she was growing up and having to face the adult world perhaps that world was still very contrived and unwelcoming. Those growing pains  came through as she  fought a fictitious beast in order to best a challenge from the red queen. The director wanted a character who would be confused about facing the adult world but would later re-emerge from the famous rabbit hole to challenge the class system in which her family believed in.

Depp was an eccentric character perhaps fitting with his own eclectic style. He would be the hatter alright but he knew there would be moments when his character would enter a temporary insanity, obviously because of the hatter’s millinery work. Here is an actor who cared about how the character comes across well enough to lend himself to a whole facial changeover and the costume he wore matched the characters eccentricity.

Image via Wikipedia

Carter who played the red queen was as self-indulgent as bad queens could be, wanting only her interests to be looked after and later wanting to be feared rather than loved. Her larger face made her in something ghoulish and definitely displeasing. It contrasted with the smaller head of her younger sister whose sword had been a point of contention between the two rivals. Carter referred to the whit queen’s character as having been good natured but there were definite eccentricities interpreted by Hathaway that made this character good but very odd. One only had to watch the white queen when she faced danger and how her exaggerated hand gestures  never really matched that of a person who would have to face a war threat. When she prepared her odd concoction for Alice to return to normal size, before the latter returned to combat the “Jabberwocky” that too evoked some weird pleasure the character has to portray.