Summary
The creatures question Alice about how she can be the wrong Alice for the job of killing the Jabberwocky. Suddenly, Alice has an idea, and tries to pinch herself out of the dream she thinks she’s having, but it doesn’t work. The dormouse offers to stick her with a pin and she accepts, but when he sticks the pin in her foot, it only hurts, it doesn’t wake her up.
Suddenly a giant dog-like creature comes bounding into the clearing where they are standing, a creature that one of the other creatures refers to as the “Bandersnatch.” Alice runs as a number of red armored guards chase the group and capture many of them. Alice runs from the Bandersnatch fearfully, when suddenly she is struck with the thought that it is all a dream and nothing can hurt her. She turns to face the Bandersnatch and it stops in its tracks. In the Bandersnatch’s moment of stillness, the dormouse climbs on top of its head and sticks his pin in the Bandersnatch’s eye, pulling it from the socket. As the beast cries in pain, the group manages to escape.
After they have gotten away, a man with long black hair and an eyepatch finds the scroll detailing the future of Wonderland, climbs on top of a horse and brings the scroll to the Red Queen.
Meanwhile, Alice and the Tweedles approach a tree with signs pointing in two different directions, one towards “Snud” and one towards “Queast.” The Tweedles disagree about which direction to go, when suddenly a large bird flies by and snatches the twins. Alice manages to duck in time to not get snatched up. The Tweedles are carried by the giant bird to the castle of the Red Queen.
Inside the castle, the Red Queen is furious, screaming that someone has stolen three of her tarts. She confronts her footmen, all frogs, but they deny taking the tarts. When one of the frogs gulps, the Red Queen notices some jelly at the corner of his mouth and has him escorted outside to be executed. “Off with his head!” she announces. She tells her assistant, a fish, to prepare the frogs children, tadpoles, as a meal.
When the Queen sits down on her throne, the Knave of Hearts (the man with the eyepatch) greets her and presents her with the oraculum, pointing out the Frabjous Day, on which Alice is set to kill the Jabberwocky. The Red Queen is appalled to see that Alice is predicted to kill the Jabberwocky and orders her knights to find Alice.
The Knave of Hearts sends a hound who is chained up to look for Alice. He promises the hound freedom if he finds Alice, and the hound asks if his wife and pups will be freed as well. “Everyone will go home,” the Knave says. They unchain the hound and he goes off in search of Alice, followed by several soldiers of the Red Queen. “Dogs will believe anything,” the Knave’s horse says to him.
In a dark forest, Alice encounters a smiling cat, the Cheshire Cat, who comments on the scratch the Bandersnatch gave her. The Cheshire Cat offers to purify the wound with his evaporating skills, but Alice does not want him to, sure that it is just a dream wound. The Cheshire Cat binds it with a cloth instead and asks Alice her name. He is impressed to hear she is the Alice from the scroll and offers to take her to the Hare and the Hatter.
Next to a large dilapidated windmill is a long table at which sit the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, surrounded by a drab and dusty tea party. The dormouse from earlier emerges from a teapot. As Alice walks towards the table, the Hatter and the Hare look excited. The Hatter approaches Alice, overjoyed at her presence, even though the dormouse insists that she is the wrong Alice. He disagrees with the dormouse and drags Alice to the head of the table, announcing that they have to move forward with the Frabjous Day.
“Have you any idea why a raven is like a writing desk?” the Hatter says suddenly, before suggesting that Alice must soon slay the Jabberwocky. The Cheshire Cat, who has seated himself at the other end of the table, complains about all the talk of blood and slaying. As the Hatter chides him sarcastically for not taking the revolution against the Red Queen more seriously, the Cheshire Cat says, “What happened that day was not my fault.”
The Mad Hatter stands angrily and begins screaming at the Cheshire Cat, but the dormouse convinces him to stop. The Cheshire Cat notes that the Hatter used to throw great parties and be a wonderful dancer—especially with a dance called the Futterwacken. “On the Frabjous Day, when the White Queen once again wears the crown…On that day, I shall Futterwacken vigorously,” says the Hatter.
Suddenly the Knave of Hearts arrives, so the Hatter gives Alice the shrinking potion to drink and she gets even smaller. He stuffs her in a teapot just as the Knave arrives and the hound begins sniffing around. The March Hare throws a teacup at the Knave. The Knave ducks and tells them he’s looking for Alice, but the Hatter leads the dormouse and the Hare in a rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat.”
The Knave threatens the Hatter that if they are hiding Alice they will lose their heads. “Already lost them!” jokes the Hatter and the tea party trio continues to sing. The hound comes close to revealing Alice’s whereabouts, but the Hatter urges him to lead the group of soldiers astray. The Knave and the others leave, following the bloodhound. The Hatter constructs a little dress for Alice out of the excess cloth from her old dress, and slips it to her in the teapot.
On the table, the dormouse tells Alice that she is lucky that the hound was cooperative. The Hatter invites Alice—still miniaturized—to step onto his hat, which she does, and he walks her through the forest. As they walk down the path, the Hatter recites the poem “The Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. “I’m not slaying anything…so put it out of your mind,” Alice says. With that, the Hatter puts Alice down on a rock, disappointed with her. “You’ve lost your muchness,” he tells Alice, and she asks him to tell her what the Red Queen has done.
He begins the story. He used to be the hatter to the White Queen. We see a flashback of a jubilant garden, over which the White Queen is presiding. All of a sudden, destruction breaks out, as the Red Queen’s soldiers burn the idyllic garden and the Knave steals the White Queen’s vorpal sword.
Back in the present, the Hatter hears the hound approaching with the red knights and makes a run for it, hiding behind a tree. He instructs Alice to go to the White Queen’s castle, placing her in his hat and throwing the hat across a pond. She lands on the ground with a thud.
Analysis
What becomes more and more puzzling to Alice is the fact that all of the fantastical events that take place in Wonderland do not seem to be a dream at all. As she starts to get overwhelmed with the questions and concerns being leveled at her, Alice goes to pinch herself in hopes that it will help her wake up from what feels like a nightmare, but it has no effect. As circumstances get wilder and wilder, populated by stranger and stranger phenomena, Alice is also starting to face that fact that her time in Wonderland is very real.
Nevertheless, Alice still believes on some level that she is inside of a dream—that Wonderland is a world separate from her daily, waking life. This is what gives her the conviction that she can do things she otherwise couldn't, and enables her to muster the courage to face Wonderland’s various dangers. When she is on the run from the bandersnatch, she has a realization that it cannot hurt her, as she is dreaming, so she turns around to face it. The fact that she is not running causes the bandersnatch to stop in its tracks, allowing the dormouse to get the upper hand. The unreality of the scenario allows Alice to muster her courage and face the scariest part of the magical world.
The villain of the film is the Red Queen, an imperious and capricious queen with an oversized head whose self-importance and paranoia is as farcical as it is intimidating. A surreal-looking figure, with a large head and a small body, the Red Queen screams at her servants when she is dissatisfied, a spoiled and easily-angered monarch. She is literally and figuratively big-headed, with a giant mound of red hair and cartoonish Elizabethan makeup, and it does not take long to realize that she is the villain.
The visual world of the film, in true Tim Burton style, is elaborate and impressive. The colors, effects, and settings are unique and outrageous. For instance, the Red Queen is not simply an actress in some whacky makeup, but a full CGI creation, the image of a body that has been completely morphed, something between a human and an illustration. The dark forest of Wonderland is not simply a dark forest, but a primordial environment, with twisting vines, crooked branches, and ominous mists. Burton truly makes the world of Wonderland into a dreamscape, not simply a recognizable setting with a few quirks.
The film takes many departures from Lewis Carroll’s original book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, on which it is based. While many of the characters are the same, Tim Burton and the screenwriter Linda Woolverton take some liberties with the circumstances, mixing elements of both the first book and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. While Carroll’s book follows Alice in a rather more leisurely encounter through Wonderland, Burton’s film sets her down in the middle of a contentious war between the citizens of Wonderland and the tyrannical Red Queen. The Mad Hatter is, as in the book, an absurd and eccentric host of a tea party, but he is also a revolutionary, anxious to see the heroic Alice slay the Jabberwocky and help to overthrow the monarchy.
