Alice Through The Looking Glass, film review: Priceless lessons for budding young Alices everywhere

James Bobin's yummy follow up to Tim Burton’s extravaganza confounds expectations and feels like a healthy choice for growing girls, says Charlotte O'Sullivan

Six years ago Alice in Wonderland made a lot of money. Tim Burton’s extravaganza boasted 3D effects and a colour scheme that made you feel as if you’d drunk a gazillion raspberry sherbet milkshakes in one go. It also turned Lewis Carroll’s chatty child heroine into a teen killer.

For the follow-up, incoming director James Bobin confounds expectations. Yes, he gives us lashings of CGI but vis-à-vis the action he doesn’t pump it up. Those hoping to see our valiant Victorian in a smack-down with a gigantic foe (the Jabberwocky’s peeved mum, perhaps) will be gutted.

After a bit of derring-do at sea establishes Alice’s credentials as a leader of men, Bobin and his team explore other ways in which the marginalised can do battle. Alice (Mia Wasikowska), trying to protect herself, along with her mother (Lindsay Duncan) and the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp), from conniving aristos, wields not a single weapon. Fight and flight here can’t be disentangled. Alice’s quest involves her crossing various time zones in an almost non-stop chase. An alternative title for this epic would be Run Alice Run.

Her nemesis, once again, is the sister-loathing, bulbous-headed Iracebeth/Queen of Hearts (Helena Bonham Carter). The latter has been cosying up to a lonely, despotic fellow called Time (Sacha Baron Cohen). The chemistry between Bonham Carter and Baron Cohen proves fiendishly fizzy. Bonham Carter made her debut in A Room with a View; Baron Cohen burst onto the scene with Ali G. Both actors have escaped their respective straitjackets. She’s become a major comedian. He’s capable of moving us to tears.

Still crazy after all these years: Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter with Mia Wasikowska as Alice (Peter Mountain/Disney)
Disney

The children I took along to the screening loved the back-to-the-past stuff. Great casting and digital effects make it a pleasure to meet the Hatter as a child (along with sensitive, pre-pubescent Iracebeth, her complicated sister, Mirana, and even the Cheshire Kitten).

Mature females in the audience may be more taken with the idea that the future isn’t something to fear. Scriptwriter Linda Woolverton not only offers new angles on the work of Carroll but also the feminist icon Sylvia Plath. Alice drowns herself in a magic mirror. And what she discovers is an old(er) woman, who rises toward her like a wonderful fish.

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1/99

Bobin says that he made this film for his eight-year-old daughter, to remind her there’s more to life than looking good. It may worry some that the end result is so very good-looking (every frame seems designed to make the aesthetically-inclined drool). Nevertheless, this yummy film feels like a healthy choice for growing girls. Though it probably won’t earn a billion dollars, what it offers is priceless.

Cert PG, 113 mins

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