The Friday Fillip

I like Alice. I have a (very) modest collection of her adventures, as told by the oddman Dodgson orse Carroll (including a “Wonderland” published in Moscow in English — 1 rouble 30 kopek — with Russian commentary and illustrations). I bring this up because Disney is at it again, it seems, and, traditionalist curmudgeon that I am, I have deeply resented what Disney has done to some of the great children’s classics in the past. But this time I wonder…

For one thing, the new movie is being directed by Tim Burton. Hard to think of anyone more a directorial oddman than Helena Bonham Carter’s husband. For another (thing), he’s assembling his usual repertory company, which is to say Ms Bonham Carter as the Red Queen [pic] and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter [pic], inter alia, all “digitally enhanced (sic)”. To avoid the scorn of people like me, Disney has shifted things this time, and it’s a 17-year-old Alice who pays a return visit to Wonderland, now in its new and improved form.

Some of what’s been deliberately leaked looks visually interesting. To see how it’s going to be, take a look at the panoramic pics that let you zoom in and pan.

If the story’s changed, I shouldn’t gripe about the art. The number of illustrators who have tackled Alice is almost beyond counting. Tenniel’s art is canonical, of course. There’s a site that gathers together all of his illustrations (now beyond copyright) and lets you view them online or download them in a zipped file. Rather than list some of his successors, I thought I’d present you with thumbnails of their various takes on Alice.

(Click on the thumbnail to enlarge the image.)

Tenniel	Rackham	Attwell	Kirk
Gutman	Jackson	Dali	My Russian

Just in case you think that I think that the pics are the only point, let me point you to some text resources for your Wonderland reading pleasure: the marvelous Gutenberg has the whole of the book online; if you’d prefer it more in a bed-time story mode, let the voices on LibriVox read it to you; finally, for the need-to-know-it-all in you (yes, I’m looking at you), there’s Martin Gardner’s splendid Annotated Alice, of which I can only give you glimpses online, thanks to Google Books.