Tim Burton is often singled out for his very distinctive style—a whimsical touch with a large dose of the macabre. Viewers can often identify a film by Burton right away right away. With Alice in Wonderland, Burton combines his signature Gothic style with very easily recognizable characters from children's literature. Alice, a misfit independent thinker in a world of conformists, fits easily into the canon of Tim Burton protagonists like Edward Scissorhands, Ichabod Crane, and Lydia Deetz.
Burton's eye tends towards the darker, more twisted elements of a narrative and his version of the dystopian Wonderland reflects this and fits in well with Linda Woolverton's reimagined adaptation. Burton's Wonderland is not the whimsical and luminous Wonderland of the Lewis Carroll novel or the Disney film, but a gritty and uncanny landscape, still fantastical, but also unsettling, presided over by a tyrannical ruler. Burton illustrates the more tawdry elements of life in this "Underland" through the visual landscape he constructs. From the twisted trees near the Cheshire Cat to the rundown windmill by the Mad Hatter's tea party, to the crimson halls of the Red Queen's palace, Burton reminds the viewer that this is a shadowy, more adult version of the classic story.
At the time of the film's release, it received mixed reviews from critics, with many noting that Burton's extensive use of CGI and special effects took some of the joy and magic out of the story. Ty Burr wrote for The Boston Globe, "Most of the thought, as you’d expect, has gone into the art direction. The look of Alice in Wonderland is a mixture of the intriguingly grotesque and the big-movie banal, with a heaping side dish of Maxfield Parrish. There are sublime inventions —the stressed-out little monkeys, pigs, and frogs who serve as the Queen’s minions—and Colleen Atwood’s costumes adapt to Alice’s changing size with ingenious grace. But the visuals are just as often busy without being interesting, and Burton uses 3-D in shockingly hackneyed ways." Others, like Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, disagreed, writing, "...even Disney and a PG rating can’t bury Burton’s subversive wit. Like Carroll, he’s a master at dressing up psychic wounds in fantasy."
