My favorite books ever are Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.* Actually, I don’t remember whether I liked them when I was a kid–I think, vaguely, I thought they were just too weird. But maybe that’s just apocryphal memory-making. In high school, a friend of mine reintroduced me to them, and to The Annotated Alice, which explains all the weird stuff in the books, from defining most of the words in “Jabberwocky” to giving the original poems that were being parodied.
…and now, to know that Tim Burton’s going to direct a version? Ah, such sweet sorrow, to know that Gene Wilder is dead, and can no longer sing “Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup.” I love Tim Burton’s work, but man, I don’t know if he can top the Gene Wilder version. (Well, I say Gene
Wilder, but the director is Nick Willing, who also did the awesome Photographing Fairies. Ooh, this is the same guy that’s doing the new Tin Man series, which I have been wanting to check out. Internets good.)
*So why do I like them so much? What seems like order is actually nonsense; what seems like nonsense is actually order. I grew up in the same kind of era that Alice did–the same kinds of pressures for extreme conformity, prudery, and the idea that just because someone had been doing something for years that it made any kind of sense whatsoever! Once I understood the books were made to mock the ordinary way of things, Alice became my hero: “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!” A fair iconoclast 🙂
‘The Annotated Alice’ is a great book. I liked the stories as a kid, they were so surreal, but it is fun to actually go back and re-read them and understand now what all the strange words and phrases actually mean.
Tim Burton though…
I have a hard time disliking the things Tim Burton has directed (I really need to go see his version of Sweeney Todd) but ‘Alice in Wonderland’ by him is going to be dark and strange (okay, darker and stranger) and I have a hard time imagining what it is going to be like.
Still, according to IMDB it looks like it isn’t coming out until 2010 so plenty of time to get used to the idea and hunt for leaked imagery from the movie.
Here’s the link to American Magee’s Alice. Very dark. Tim Burton’s will probably be less dark.
If you mean the video game (for some reason, I can’t get the link to open, stupid browser), I actually played that back in the day on my PC. Very creepy dark, not a great game but not awful either.
Maybe ‘dark’ isn’t quite the right word for what I expect from Tim Burton, but ‘creepy’ or ‘surreal’ might be better. Still, can’t wait to see what does happen with it.
If nothing else, it’ll have to be better than the Disney version.