At 19 years of age, it‘s back down the rabbit hole for one of literature‘s most beloved heroines, Alice (played by Mia Wasikowska), and back into Wonderland, or Underland as she now learns it is called. Welcome to Tim Burton‘s vision of Lewis Carroll‘s playful alternate universe.

　　Burton‘s adaptation is rightly careless of slavishly rendering its source in wholly loyal detail. Any purists who argue that this Alice doesn‘t work because it strays so far from the text are wrong: this Alice doesn‘t work for the far more essential reason that the characters are too often missing a basic lifeforce of their own, possibly a result of being enbalmed in stunning-looking but airless CGI. They‘re not helped by dialogue that feels like an afterthought to a long-planned series of conceptual character designs.

　　There‘s also that nagging "teacher‘s pantomime" feeling, familiar from the Harry Potter series, brought on by a cast list that reads like a who‘s who of national treasures. They‘re mostly great actors, but really classic voice work in animation comes when you hear a character speak and their voice is a seamless part of that character, not when you hear a character speak and think "Ah, that‘s Alan Rickman."