My first encounter with “Alice in Wonderland” came when I defaced our family copy of Lewis Carroll’s children's classic as a 3-year-old.
I was just learning to draw stick figures -- the kind with a huge circle for a head and then straight lines extending from it for hands and legs -- and I decorated the first couple pages of “Alice” with my artwork. My mother was not pleased with my creative efforts and lectured me on why we don’t use books as drawing paper.
I bring this up because the creative team behind the latest film adaptation of “Alice in Wonderland,” director Tim Burton and screenwriter Linda Woolverton, have done their own version of doodling upon the original. This is not so much “Alice” as “Alice, the Sequel.”
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Plenty of memorable works of art use an earlier book, painting, film or play as their starting point. Playwright Tom Stoppard made his name by hilariously ripping off “Hamlet,” putting two of its minor characters front and center in his 1967 comedy “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead.”
In 2000, “Shadow of the Vampire,” amusingly and hauntingly posited that Max Schreck, the actor who played the vampire in the 1922 silent classic, “Nosferatu,” was himself really a creature of the night. And Quentin Tarantino’s Oscar-nominated “Inglourious Basterds” rewrites history (while borrowing from numerous earlier WWII films) to end Hitler’s life with a rousing bang rather than a wimpy, self-inflicted one.
Such creative borrowing or morphing isn’t restricted just to plays and movies. In today’s art world, it’s known as “appropriation,” and entire careers have been built upon it. In the recording industry, of course, it’s “sampling,” with musicians judiciously weaving threads taken from predecessors into fresh musical tapestries.
Art feeds upon itself; it always has.
Carroll’s two fantasy novels, “Alice Adventures in Wonderland,” published in 1865, and “Through the Looking Glass,” its 1871 follow-up -- the two are usually published jointly as “Alice in Wonderland” -- have served as the basis for numerous adaptations and transmutations over the years.
In my culture-vulture memory bank, two stand out: Meryl Streep, clad in blue overalls, playing a wonderfully bratty, know-it-all Alice on the stage of New York’s Public Theater in 1981 in a musical version, “Alice in Concert” by Liz Swados; and “Dream Child,” an underappreciated 1985 film starring Australian-born actress Coral Browne (the third and last Mrs. Vincent Price) as an elderly Alice Hargreaves, the real-life inspiration for Carroll’s Alice. Looking back across more than seven decades at her relationship with the child-obsessed author, she finally faces up to the fact that it was curious and curiouser -- and not in a good way.
This latest “Alice,” shot in 3D, sends a now 19-year old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) down the rabbit hole yet again. She finds herself in a strange and mysterious place called Underland, which she visited years ago as a child, mistaking its name then for Wonderland and thinking the trip was all a dream.
