Disney has released the first trailer for their upcoming fantasy film Alice: Through the Looking Glass, which is the sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland. In the sequel, “Alice returns to the whimsical world of Underland and travels back in time to save the Mad Hatter.”
Starring Johnny Depp, Anne Hathaway, Mia Wasikowska, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Helena Bonham Carter along with the voices of Alan Rickman, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall, the film is directed by James Bobin and produced by Tim Burton. It will be released on May 27th, 2016.
I don’t know many people who liked Burton’s take on Lewis Carroll’s story, which is a book that I love and read through once every two or three years. And while there are people who think a sequel can’t really get any worse, I’m seeing this and think that it can’t really get any better. There is simply way too much CGI that is blatantly obvious for me to feel like anyone is ever in any danger. The best kinds of CGI are the ones that are used to amplify what’s already physically there, not the other way around.
Alice’s tales through Wonderland take the strange sights we see in nature and amplify them to surreal levels. However, there is always something grounding those images in reality, be it a forest, an ocean, a chessboard, or a house that is too small to contain Alice. These kinds of images can easily be filmed and then the additions come on top of that.
Sorry for ranting, it’s just that I love the Alice mythos and I think that going down a CGI-heavy route such as this is almost insulting to what could be if the effort were put in. Get Stan Winston to make a real Jabberwocky just like how a real T-Rex was made for ‘Jurassic Park’. Yeah, it’s unreliable and unwieldy. But when you see it on the big screen and marvel at the beauty of it, doesn’t that make it all worth it? Isn’t that what going to the movies is all about?