- Alice through the looking glass review los angeles times movie#
- Alice through the looking glass review los angeles times full#
Alice grows and shrinks several times, which she finds “very confusing”. When the Caterpillar asks her who she is, she is unable to answer, as she feels that she has changed several times since that morning.Īmong other things, this doubt about her identity is nourished by her physical appearance. Later on, the White Rabbit mistakes her for his maid Mary Ann. She is constantly ordered to identify herself by the creatures she meets, but she herself has doubts about her identity as well.Īfter falling through the Rabbit hole, Alice tests her knowledge to determine whether she has become another girl. In Wonderland, Alice struggles with the importance and instability of personal identity. Related to the theme of ‘growing up’, is the motif of ‘identity’. At this point, she has matured too much to stay in Wonderland, the world of the children, and wakes up into the ‘real’ world, the world of adults. She realizes what the creatures in Wonderland really are ‘nothing but a pack of cards’. In the end Alice has adapted and lost most of her vivid imagination that comes with childhood. She tells the Queen of Hearts that her order is ‘nonsense’ and prevents her own beheading. She learns to cope with the crazy Wonderland rules, and during the story she gets better in managing the situation. From the Cheshire Cat she learns that ‘everyone is mad here’. More and more she starts to understand the creatures that live in Wonderland. This is also represented by her physical changes during the story, the growing and shrinking. But during the journey through Wonderland, Alice learns to understand the adult world somewhat more. A Duchess who is determined to find a moral in everything. When entering Wonderland, Alice encounters a way of living and reasoning that is quite different from her own. This leads to the incomprehensible, and sometimes arbitrary behavior that Alice experiences in Wonderland. But most people adhere to those rules blindly now, without asking themselves ‘why’. To understand our adult world, Alice has to overcome the open-mindedness that is characteristic for children.Īpparently, adults need rules to live by. With Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he wanted to describe how a child sees our adult world, including all of the (in the eyes of a child silly and arbitrary) rules and social etiquette we created for ourselves, as well as the ego’s and bad habits we have developed during our lives.Īlice’s Adventures in Wonderland represents the child’s struggle to survive in the confusing world of adults. Lewis Carroll adored the unprejudiced and innocent way young children approach the world. The most obvious theme that can be found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the theme of growing up. It seems the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) is dying because he’s so heartbroken about his long-lost family’s fate.Themes and motifs Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Growing up The film only has a cursory relation to Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass,” his sequel to “Alice in Wonderland.” The film’s wobbly plot has something to do with Alice traveling back and forth in time to discover what happened to the Mad Hatter’s family. But it’s all curiously flat and unexciting - just a lot of noise and frenetic images.
Alice through the looking glass review los angeles times full#
The scene is full of raging oceans, frantically edited sequences of people scurrying up the ship’s mast and menacing shots of jagged rocks. Take the film’s opening sequence, in which Alice (Mia Wasikowska) is a captain of a ship trying to elude a fleet of pirates.
Alice through the looking glass review los angeles times movie#
This is a movie devoid of wonder and whimsy - a key element in any Carroll adaptation you would think. In contrast, James Bobin’s sequel just seems overstuffed, with one dispiriting CGI sequence after another. At least Burton’s “Alice” was always visually interesting - full of Carroll’s floating cats, hookah-smoking caterpillars, bloodthirsty queens and mad hatters.
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