Tim and his friend Jack Skellington

Between the royal premiere and the cinema chain spat it has been hard to escape news of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland remake. News broadcasts have been full of snippets of the trailer and anticipation seems to be at a giddy high. The unlikely combination of Tim Burton and the Disney corporation, now apparently reconciled from past indiscretions provide both the effects powerhouse and the creative vision needed for such an ambitious enterprise. Despite such high hopes, there are enough red flags to warrant cautiousness to the film’s steamroller of hype.

Despite the sumptuous visual effects and use of 3-D (which we must now reluctantly come to expect from blockbuster family films), there is a soullessness to the footage released so far. The story of Alice is so breathy and inconsequential, a whimsical tale of a girl meeting a variety of odd creatures in a dreamland before returning to normality. There is no particular overarching plot bridging the encounters or any attempt at peril. There is nothing wrong with this on the page, but it makes for a very difficult movie. Allegedly Burton is aware of this and has promised a greater overarching narrative to the film. Unfortunately the more coherent and purposeful you make Alice, the further from the original tone it strays. Quite the Catch-22.

More worrying still is Burton’s track record with remakes and adaptations. As one of Hollywood’s great creative minds it is not hard to see the sheer depth of his imagination through his sketches, poetry and films. Indeed, some of Burton’s best known works are based on his original stories: Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and the Corpse Bride. The Nightmare before Christmas is so Burtonian no-one remembers that he didn’t direct it (Except the Metro newspaper who thinks he did). All these films have strange otherworldly characters and bizarre situations, mixing light hearted humour with a devilish menace.

"I've got a rabbit in here somewhere"

Even films written by others can benefit from the Burton touch to varying degrees – Batman and Batman Returns managed to capture the hallucinatory madness of Gotham if nothing else, while Mars Attacks and Big Fish both told tall tales of deadly Martians and bizarre townsfolk.

Where Burton tends to hit roadblocks are the well-loved, established stories, already famous in their own right. His frequent casting of wife Helena Bonhan-Carter and Johnny Depp cause grating casting mismatches: Sweeney Todd was wasted on a tuneless Depp, who also managed to turn the enigmatic, dangerous yet intriguing Willy Wonka of Gene Wilder’s creation into a mincing man-child. Popular ghost story Sleepy Hollow was turned into a muddled mix of period folk tale and by-the-numbers slasher.  And let us not forget one of Burton’s biggest commercial flops, Planet of the Apes, a film that needed no remake and gained nothing in the hands of Burton.

It seems that to create something from scratch guarantees at least some genuine emotion and tone, where as trying to adapt an existing property by adding a layer of whimsy and eccentricity leaves the whole endeavour feeling rather flat. As a recent College Humour spoof of Tim Burton put it “Let’s take an old story that was already creepy and make it a shit-load creepier.� While it’s true that familiarity breeds contempt, it is dangerous for an auteur so original to become so predictable.  Hopefully the future brings new opportunities for Tim Burton and he can again entrance and mystify us like he has done in the past.

Nicholas Brown