Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland
Disney's Story Behind the Story
INTRODUCTION- July 4, 1862.
During a trip down the Thames with Reverend Robinson Duckworth and math teacher Mr. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Alice Liddell and her sisters insist on hearing a story. So Dodgson invents one about a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole and embarks on an amazing adventure. Little Alice is thrilled with the story and asks Dodgson to write it down in a book.
It takes him two years, but Dodgson finally hands the manuscript over to Alice. It's titled Alice’s Adventures Underground, and it tells of an incredible journey through forests filled with talking mushrooms and flowers while in the company of the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts.
In 1865, the book is published by MacMillan and achieves enormous success. The title has changed - it's now Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - and the author, Dodgson, uses the pen name Lewis Carroll. But the story remains the same. It's an incredible adventure that will change children's literature forever, because this time the story is written from a child's point of view.
Another book is published in 1871: Through the .Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. Even more popular than its predecessor, Carroll's second book introduces characters like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, the White Queen, the Red Queen, and Humpty Dumpty.
Lewis Carroll doesn't write any other stories about Alice, but her adventures continue as adaptations are made of Carroll's books: movies, cartoons, musicals, plays, television series, songs, videogames and comic strips.
In 2007, the Walt Disney Studios start working on a new movie inspired by Al ice's adventures. This lime, though, it's not an adaptation. The story starts many years later; when Alice is 19 years old and is about to get married. She thinks that Wonderland and all the characters she met there were a dream, the same dream that has been tormenting her since she was a child. But when she tumbles into the rabbit hole again, she finds herself living the dream once more, and she discovers that nothing is like it was before, not even herself.
It all begins with Linda Woolverton (screenwriter for Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King), who has an idea for updating the famous and beloved character. Then the director arrives: Tim Burton, former in-between artist at Disney and creator of Disney's masterpiece The Nightmare Before Christmas. Poet of the diverse throughout his filmography, Burton is the perfect choice to give shape to the story written by Woolverton.
After her father's death, Alice feels nobody understands her. She feels lost. Only Wonderland will be able to show her the way again.
