Myisha Nawar
Okay let’s face it. It is not an easy thing to re-create Lewis Carroll’s whimsical, completely topsy-turvical tale of un-reality. Underland Wonderland is a place that gyres and gimbles far too crazily with poetic, toppled over madness and inside our logic to be truly pinned to the modern sterility of digital film. It has scant links to Carroll’s curiouser novels and all of Disney’s well-appointed men and women with all of its CGI horses, cannot outshine what a well-spun page and a child’s imagination births. That said, this yesterday-and- tomorrow-but- never-today amusement feels less dark and dangerous, even with the continued Jabberwocky fire-fright and lose-your- footing threats.
The movie revives a typical London day in the *tip your hat and curtsy* year of 1875, but hold up, Alice Kingsleigh is NOT your typical 19 th century woman. She’s the kind of girl who would much rather captain her father’s cargo than attend balls. Her former fiancé, the stiff and starchy Hamish, toiled hard to push Alice’s mother into debt while Alice was at sea the past year. Whilst trying to come to terms with that trouble, Alice finds herself almost accidentally slipping through the mirror and heading back to the magical realm of
Underland. There she finds yet another quandary: the Hatter is on the very verge of death. The Grand Clock is ticking and things on both sides of the looking glass appear to be nearly impossible to work out. But wait, “impossible” can only be unpossible if one believes it to be. And Alice Kingsleigh is not your typical, everyday sort is she?