Alice in Wonderland

“You’re all late for tea!”

I really love this movie, mainly because it’s amazing, but amazing has been used to describe lots of things…. oh what a dilema…… let’s say “fantastic” then. Five stars, 10/10, that’s my rating for it. It wasn’t what I expected (while I’m saying this, I’m thinking back to the first time I saw it, not the most recent viewing), mainly because it wasn’t her going to Wonderland for the first time. It was her going back to Wonderland (I’m sorry if you already know this and being reminded annoys you), much older, and unsure about some things….

Seriously! She’s expected to marry some stuck up lord (his name is Hamish) who looks like he’s got something disgusting under his nose (which is hooked, if that means anything to you). Here’s a picture of him.

He is so so stuck up, and pretty disgusting too. Oh, and he has delicate digestion. 😛 His mother took Alice aside so that she could tell her about it, as if the girl would care! I definitely wouldn’t, and would have told the lady that. But then again, I don’t know if I’d actually do that if I was in Alice’s position. XD So she goes to the gazebo and Hamish proposes (after taking a blue caterpillar off his shoulder, he tells her she’ll want to wash the finger that touched it, and then when he finishes proposing, he gives he the most cheesy smile imaginable. And it didn’t reach his eyes. o.o HE’S AN ALIEN! Just kidding. :P) Of course, she can’t decide if she wants to, she sees a white rabbit in a waistcoat who pulls a pocket watch out of his pocket (where else would he keep it?) and taps it. So she says she needs a moment and runs off after him.

Eventually she reaches a tree, and looks down the rabbit hole. Some of the earth her hand is on crumbles away and she falls in. Of course… if you’ve read the book (or seen any of the movies, I haven’t done either by the way) you’ll know that the hole is full of weird things. At one point, a piano almost lands on her, but it becomes immobile, just hanging there…. lucky Alice. So she finally breaks through this “ceiling”, which actually turns out to be the floor (of course, the floor goes back to normal shortly after that). So when she sits up, she’s on the ceiling, and her hair is floating upwards (I love that scene).

As soon as she noticed, she fell to the floor (ouch, another bruise to add to the collection). So then she discovers the key, blah blah blah, checks all the doors, finds the bottle with the “drink me” tag on it, drinks it (reasoning that it is “only a dream”), and shrinks. And once she’s shrunk she runs to the small door she discovered behind the curtain, and discovers she forgot the key on the table. As she’s jumping to reach the table rim, we switch to a different view. Now we see her through a keyhole, and some people are whispering that “you brought the wrong Alice!” and someone is replying that she’s the right Alice, “I’m sure of it”.

So after a bit, she discovers a small cake that has “eat me” iced onto it. So of course she eats it, and she grows (and grows, and grows, and grows…) until she is slightly hunched so that her head doesn’t go through the ceiling. Luckily, she stopped growing there. Meanwhile, behind the keyhole (I mean, the door) the commentary continues. “I tell you she’s the wrong Alice!” says one, “Give her a chance”, says another.

So she finally gets outside, and after a bit, she’s greeted by a strange sight. Two fat little men (they’d be little if she was her normal height), a dodo bird (in a waistcoat), the white rabbit (also in a waistcoat), a mouse with a tunic and a needle-sword, and a couple of flowers. After a bit of conversation, they decide to go consult Absolem, and he decides that she is “not hardly Alice”.

Shortly after that, they get ambushed by a Bandersnatch and a group of soldiers (who are shaped like, and probably are, playing cards). They are led by the Knave of Hearts, Ilosovic Stayne. His character is good (his legs are strangely long and sometimes he seems sort of….. clumsy, but that could just be me), and if he wasn’t such a total jerk, I might like him. So meanwhile, Alice is running, at one point, she stops and turns to face the Bandersnatch, saying that it’s a dream and nothing can hurt her. The mouse (Mallymkun) runs towards her yelling “run you great lump!”, before jumping onto the Bandersnatch and (warning: gross part here) stabs his eye, then pulls it out on her needle before running away with it.

Eeew, I know! Just totally disgusting, but it does help Alice then, and later in the movie. So she runs on, with Tweedledum and Tweedledee accompanying her. Now, before I continue, if you’ve ever seen anything with Matt Lucas in it (like Little Britain), then you’ll recognize the features of the two, and the contradictory way they speak. They are two of my favorite characters because of the fact that they’re absolutely hilarious, and because Matt Lucas plays them of course.

The two are kidnapped by the Jubjub bird when the three stand at a cross-roads, trying to figure out which way to go (both of them want to go in different directions). So they get taken to the red queen’s castle, and the Queen of Hearts makes her dramatic entrance (which I quite enjoyed). “SOMEONE HAS STOLEN THREE OF MY TAWTS!” At least, it sounded like “tawts” to me. I didn’t notice it the first time I watched, but then again, there were quite a few things I didn’t notice the first time I saw it.

So she interrogates the frog footmen, and when the one who ate three of the tarts is discovered and dragged away (she didn’t even listen to his full explanation before yelling “Off with his head!”), saying that he has little ones to look after, the queen told a fish to send someone to his house to collect his children, “I love tadpoles on toast almost as much as I love caviar”, being what she said. That was a little disgusting and horrifying (the poor frog!) Anyway, shortly after that, the Knave arrives and shows her some sort of scroll that is the calendric compendium of each and every day in Underland (only Alice as a little girl called it Wonderland) since the beginning of time. He points out the day where Alice kills the Jabberwocky. “She killed my Jabberbabywocky?!” was the queen’s reaction, the Knave points out that it hasn’t happened yet, but it will if they don’t do anything.

And so the great chase starts (and we meet a bloodhound, who happens to be one of my favorite characters, named Bayard). Meanwhile, Alice has met the Cheshire Cat and he’s guided her to the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, and Mallymkin. So after a bit of discussion (the hatter says that she is absolutely Alice), the Knave of Hearts and the others come.

So basically, everyone expects her to kill the red queen’s “Jabberbabywocky” so that the crown is restored to the white queen. Instead of going to her though, Alice forced Bayard to take her to the red queen’s castle so she could save the Hatter. Getting in involves using decaying heads (that float in the moat, hey a rhyme!) as stepping stones to get close to the wall. After becoming the queen’s favorite (she ate a little too much of the cake that makes you grow, and thus became really huge, so the queen said that anyone with a head as large as hers was welcome in her court), she discovered that the Vorpal Sword is at the castle, the white rabbit leads her to the place where the Bandersnatch is kept. After he faints, Alice runs off and finds the mouse, and takes the eyeball of the Bandersnatch from her.

Going back, she goes inside and rolls it to the Bandersnatch, this allows her to get to the Vorpal sword, but her arm (where the Bandersnatch scratched her earlier) is hurting a lot, the cat had said “it will fester and putrify” when he’d seen it. I really like the Bandersnatch, it’s not really bad. It becomes her friend, and when she had to escape, it broke out of it’s shed and rescued her, bowling over the card soldiers like dominoes. Bayard then led them to the white queen’s palace.

When the Knave reported this…. “Alice has escaped”, smack, “with the vorpal sword”, smack, “on the Bandersnatch”, smack. But they had her “conspirators”. The Hatter, “and a dormouse”. XD That was just priceless to me. A hatter and a dormouse, just hilarious, though I’m not sure why.

Anyway, the movie is really good, and you’ll lurv it if you’re anything like me….. or like the people I know who like it, whichever floats your boat. XD Anyway, if you watch it, I sincerely hope you’ll enjoy it. And by the way…. the quote is from the March Hare, just before he threw a teacup at the Knave when he arrived.

– LCD