This version of the Lewis Carroll children’s classic was filmed for television and includes the characters found in both “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass,” the sequel. As a Carroll fan (I’ve even read “The Hunting of the Snark”) I was curiouser and curiouser to watch this film, but I’m sorry to say, I was disappointed.
It all began with Tina Majorino, the young lady chosen to play Alice. While I generally consider her to be a great actress, I didn’t feel that she gave us the performance we needed. She was fourteen when she made this film and was too old, in my opinion, for the part, and we never felt any connection with her or sympathy for the plight in which she found herself.
The storyline, too, was all wrong. We begin the story with Alice preparing to sing in front of her mother’s society friends, but she doesn’t want to go through with it. She runs out to the garden to escape the pressure, and there falls asleep to have her adventure. Throughout the film, character after character talks to her about the importance of not being afraid and they tell her that performing really isn’t that bad. The Mad Hatter (Martin Short) and the March Hare even do a song-and-dance number about it, which fully pulls us away from the real story.
We also see the introduction of characters that never existed in the book, such as Mr. Mouse. I don’t understand this at all—the book has a rich variety of characters to choose from; why do we need to invent more to make the story more exciting?
My three-year-old remained glued to the show for about twenty minutes, which is pretty good for him, but my other children wandered away after a time, and it was hard for me not to wander as well. If you’re looking for a good version of “Alice in Wonderland” to share with your family, stick with the tried and true Disney version. The only thing that gave this film any interest at all was Whoopi Goldberg as the Cheshire Cat.
This film was rated PG.
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