Alice in Wonderland vs Return to Oz

I have had a busy week, with no writing so far and it's Sunday already! April should be a better month though, with Easter and another long weekend that I'm taking at the end of the month. Whole DAYS for writing. I shall be like A Real Writer(TM).

As part of that busy-ness, I saw Alice in Wonderland on Wednesday, with buddies from my old job. We went to Imax and got the full 3D experience, which was a tad overwhelming at times when there were character close-ups. I was only able to focus on, like, a single nostril or an eyelash, rather than their whole face.

Verdict: D. It's "missing something", as Julia put it, and I agree. Like a soul. Or a heart. I didn't care for any of the characters. En passant, why is it called Alice in Wonderland when in this movie it's not, it's "Underland"? So, I giggled a few times, got vertigo a couple of times. I liked guessing who all the voices were. Even though I didn't care for any of the characters, I thought the casting was absolutely brilliant. But those things don't really add up to anything that can redeem the shabby story. It's not the one you know; it's a made-up sequel where an adult Alice returns to Underland where the Red Queen has run amok with her Jabberwocky.

The story makes me think of Return to Oz. Have you seen Return to Oz? The 1985 'sequel' to the Wizard of Oz. But it ain't no musical. It's dark and crazy and terrifying and enthralling and everything Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" wanted to be.

In Return to Oz, Dorothy is sent to a mental institution because she refuses to stop talking or dreaming about this "imaginary" world. She manages to escape before she can be given electroshock therapy (yeah, you heard me right!) and finds her way back to Oz. But it's a world changed from the one she last visited: the evil Nome King has taken over in co-operation with the wicked Mombi. Mombi's minions are the Wheelers, a gang of gurgling gulping punkish creatures who have wheels instead of hands and feet. The Nome King has turned everyone to stone and Mombi has chopped off all the beautiful maidens' heads, which she keeps in a room of glass cages AND SHE WEARS THEM, changing her head at whim. There's a desert that turns everything living that touches it to sand. There's the crumbled and deserted ghost town that was once Emerald City, a destroyed Yellow Brick Road, the imprisoned Scarecrow... This movie is actually based on the books, in a way the musical wasn't, so it's not really a sequel but a whole new imagining.


I adored Return to Oz as a kid. It was absorbing and scary and awesome. And the best thing is, I watched it again about 5 years ago and it was still cool. There's movies you loved as a kid that don't stand the test of time but this one does (I'm sorry, Dark Crystal, but those weird puppet voices freak me out, I can't stand em. That one has to stay in my childhood).

I can't help but compare Burton's Alice in Wonderland with Return to Oz, as the storylines are so similar and so are the character roles, and they are both filled to the brim with quirky weirdness. But in Return to Oz, you care about the characters. You WANT Dorothy and Tik-Tok and Jack Pumpkinhead and Gump and Bellina to succeed.


Dorothy is resourceful and good-hearted, she doesn't pine & mope into the sunset like Alice or declare that she can't do something (Don't you find Alice a bit... bland?). The Wheelers are wonderfully scary and would knock over the Red Army without a backward glance. Mombi is sadistic and mean and would KICK the Red Queen's ASS. The Red Queen cares too much, she wavers on whether she wants to be loved or feared. Mombi has no such qualms.


As for the Knave of Hearts, his limp-wristed posturing is no match for the vengeful and deep voiced and threatening Nome King -- even if the Nome King has a secret achilles heel issue... I guess we'd have to compare the Mad Hatter to Jack Pumpkinhead, the latter being a bit sappy, so this might be the only case where Alice in Wonderland has the edge. But that weird talking dog Bayard is boring compared to Tik-Tok, the fierce metallic army of Oz with his twitching brass moustache and habit of winding-down at inconvenient times, and the Dormouse is cute but ineffective and not quite as entertaining as Gump, who is quite possibly the weirdest character I've ever seen in a movie, being half moose and half couch (that's right: he's furniture).

Plus, in Return to Oz, there's Bellina the talking chicken, and a tree that grows lunchboxes! I think I want to watch it again now...