Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland

I was delighted to hear that we'll be seeing director Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland next year. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (read and see the facsimile of the original book, with Arthur Rackham's illustrations, here) and Through the Looking Glass (read here) are two of my early favorite books, and anything by Burton (his most recent film was his version of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd) is bound to be, at the very least, a visual treat. The cast includes Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Helen Bonham Carter (Burton's wife) as the Red Queen, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat and Mia Wasikowska as Alice.

According to Burton in an article in Disney's new magazine, Disney Twenty-Three, the new film is not a re-telling of the 1865 novel, but a new story that has Alice returning to Wonderland, as a teenager, several years after the events of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. He describes the movie as "kind of a mixture of some distorted live action and animation." Hmmmm.

Here are a few of the images that recently were released by Disney to give a feel for Burton's artistic concept. You can find more images here and here. I'm looking forward to learning more.

Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter

Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen