Tim Burton's 2010 film Alice in Wonderland is an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's original novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with some elements of the novel that followed, Through the Looking Glass, serving as additional inspiration. In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a young girl falls down a rabbit hole and into a fantastical realm known as Wonderland. In Tim Burton's film, with a screenplay adapted by Linda Woolverton, Alice returns as an adult who struggles with the expectation of social conformity in Victorian England. Over the course of the film she comes to realize that she has visited Wonderland before as a child, believing it had only been a dream. Her prophetic calling to abolish the rule of the tyrannical Red Queen in Wonderland inspires her to seek similarly bold adventure in her "real life."
Alice in Wonderland is Tim Burton 21st film. It stars Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Mia Wasikowska as Alice, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts, and Matt Lucas as both Tweedledum and Tweedledee. This film marks the sixth collaboration between Depp and Carter and director Burton. The film would go on to receive a sequel, 2016's Alice Through the Looking Glass.
The film received mixed reviews upon opening, as most of the critics felt that though it was visually spectacular, it became somewhat generic in the plot's climax. Another criticism was that while the film's style and effects were praiseworthy, the overuse of computer-generated imagery (CGI) detracted from its quality. Furthermore, critics noted that the overall narrative lacked the coherence and spirit of Carroll's original work. Phillip French, for The Observer, criticized the film's ending, in which Alice becomes an "imperial entrepreneur," staking out a trade route to China.
