feature rough draft

Tim Burton has produced a lot of films in the past. They are all very unique in the odd almost weird way they are written and made. Walking and talking corpses, an eerie Willy Wanaka in charley and the chocolate factory, and now the mad hatter in Alice in wonderland. The mad hatter wasn’t the only character he put his creativity into thought. He used every bit of imagination he has to create not only the rolls in the movie but the world as well. From the second the movie starts he makes every setting as abstract as possible, and when Alice falls down the whole into wonderland the imagination only gets better.
Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum defiantly steel you’re heart from the start. Their innocence and adorable clueless expressions have you laughing even is the scene is serious. “They reminded me of little twin babies just waddling around with no clue in the world” my little sister Kaila said. “They were by far my favorite characters.”
I thought the Red Queen was very well done. Aside from insisting every other person head get cut off she wasn’t very cruel. While she was defiantly nothing like Glenda the good witch of the East, she wasn’t nearly as scary as the Ice Queen from Narnia. “I think it was because there was so much humor in everything she did or said” Ian an employee at the movie theatre told me. “The way she bossed people around was funny because it seemed like she was never taken seriously. The way she laughed at Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum and made a friend with ‘Um’ from Umbrage all made her a little softer.” Now if you need a good bad guy to make a movie worth your while don’t be discouraged. She was still on a mission to have Alice killed and be the Queen so that she can be in control of the land. She makes the perfect enemy.
Ann Hathaway played the White Queen. She was the good guy who always talked like she was out of breath and never put her arms at her sides. They were always raised in the air. I do think the part was played well but at the same time maybe a little too exaggerated. She would come across as a wind up doll doing everything gracefully with no flaw. Then all of a sudden the wind up slowed down and ended with Ann gagging at something. It was obvious that it was intentional but did take away from the flow of the movie I thought. I did like the fact that she could not fight the Red Queen because killing is against her vows, yet she had no problem asking someone else to do it for her.
Alice was really something else. In the beginning of the movie you learn she is a little off beat from everyone else when she turns her corset into boots. She has a blunt honest charm you can’t help but admire. When she is purposed to in front of what was at least a hundred people by a man she did not want to marry she turned around and ran away following the rabbit without giving an answer. She then falls into the hole and travels to wonderland.
The Mad Hatter was my favorite character. Jonny Depp mastered the awkward and nuttiness of the roll. The way talked walked and acted all matched up perfectly to appear as someone who may have lost their mind. His eyes were also very mesmerizing as if he could get you to believe anything he wanted you to. The makeup used on him was incredible. The bright opposite colors really stood out. His orange hair stands on and shoots out from his head as if he were just electrocuted.
I went to see the movie with one of my close friends Livy and she couldn’t get over how the settings and animation resembled her own dreams as a little girl. “I feel like have fallen down that very same whole!” she said in the middle of the movie. Later she explained how the different objects placed randomly around Alice as she fell appeared the same way in her memories. “I saw a piano, a cat, a bed, and even an old lady when I used to have those dreams.” When she was younger her and her family lived out on a farm way up north in Minnesota. They were about five minutes on foot away from the nearest lake and just beyond it were small woods that only lasted about a mile or so down the road. “I remember going there and imagining it was a huge magical forest where all kinds of strange and impossible things happened. Sometimes I even had dreams about it, I lived in the forest and were friends with the creatures and fought that bad guys” she told me “that’s why the movie was so strange for me, I felt like I’d seen parts of it before and Alice and I think the same way.”
While her stories were very fun and interesting to hear I enjoyed the movie for a different reason. Unlike Livy who felt like she’d experienced it before I was introduced to this magical place where impossible things happened for the very first time. As you watch you find yourself slipping out of the real world, the theatre your sitting in and the people around you no longer exist and you’re in this whole new place where you shrink when you eat cake and grow when you drink water. I do believe a large part of this feeling came from the fact the movie was in 3D. There are some movies that are brought to life a hundred times better in 3D like Avatar. I haven’t seen that movie yet myself but I have heard 2D is nothing in comparison. Then there are movies like The Notebook or even Twilight that wouldn’t really be much different either way. Alice in Wonderland would be right in the middle. Some parts of it are fast and exciting and pop when others are calm and don’t even look 3D with the glasses on. I do think it was incredible in 3D and am even a little afraid I won’t enjoy it as much later when I watch it on DVD.
There is one thing about the movie that really stuck with me, a nice little message that really makes you aware of your thoughts. Alice says more than once in the movie “I sometimes have more than six impossible thoughts before breakfast.” Because of this she is described in the movie as an odd girl. Who doesn’t have impossible thoughts? We all do. Does that make us all a little odd? Yes, I think so. Sometimes I think about how the sky is blue. Nobody ever gives it a second thought because the sky is supposed to be blue, it is not abnormal. What if the sky was supposed to be purple? What if the Grass was supposed to be yellow? Imagine what the world would look like if that were the case. Then think about this, if the grass was yellow and the sky was purple it would make no difference to us because that would be how it’s supposed to be. That’s why I enjoyed this movie so much. It brings to life someone else’s impossible thoughts and helps you think up your own.