Summary
Alice climbs off the hat, then climbs under it for shelter, sleeping in the blades of grass. The next morning, she is woken up by the sniffing of the bloodhound, Bayard, who overturns the hat. She reminds him that the Hatter told him to lead the Knave astray, but Bayard tells her that he has to find her so that his wife and pups will be freed.
Alice tells him to sit, which he does, and Bayard tells her that the Hatter gave himself up to the Red Queen. "We're going to rescue him," Alice tells Bayard, insisting that they go, since he wouldn't be captured if it were not for her. When Bayard mentions that the Frabjous Day is approaching, Alice talks back, telling Bayard that she is sick of people telling her what to do. He begins to warn her not to "stray from the path," but she insists, "I am the path!"
Bayard lowers his head and Alice climbs on top of him, ordering him to pick up the Hatter's hat with his mouth and take her to the Red Queen's castle. He runs through the countryside with Alice on his back towards the castle. When they arrive at the outer wall, they encounter a swamp, and Bayard tells Alice that the only way across is to jump from stone to stone. "Lost my muchness, have I?" she says to herself, jumping across. The stones in the swamp are actually stone faces.
Alice makes it across the swamp where she is faced with a large stone wall. She instructs Bayard to toss the hat over the wall, which he does. Alice then climbs through a small crack in the wall into the palace walls and wanders over to a tree, from behind which she watches the Red Queen play croquet using a flamingo as a mallet and a hedgehog as a ball.
The Queen hits the hedgehog with her flamingo and it goes flying. As Alice goes to try and help unbind the hedgehog's legs, the Queen sends her page, the white rabbit, to fetch the hedgehog. The white rabbit finds her and Alice asks him if he has any of the cake that will make her grow larger.
When the rabbit does not immediately return, the Queen goes in search of him. Meanwhile, he hands Alice the cake, which she eats voraciously, immediately becoming large. "What is this?" the Queen says, seeing Alice's head emerge from behind a rose bush. When the rabbit does not know how to introduce Alice, Alice tells the Queen her name is "Um from Umbridge."
"What happened to your clothes?" the Queen asks, before telling Alice that she is welcome in her court, and ordering some courtiers to fetch Alice some clothes.
Inside the castle, Alice, clothed in a makeshift dress made of curtains, stands beside the Queen's throne. The Queen calls for a pig to lie on its back in front of her throne that she can use as a foot rest. "I love a warm pig belly," the Queen says, as Alice looks over at her, quizzically. When Alice sits, the Queen dismisses everyone and calls for her "fat boys," her names for Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. The Tweedles emerge and the Queen orders them to speak.
When one of them recognizes Alice, the other steps on his toe and urges him not to give away Alice's identity. "I love my fat boys," the Queen says, laughing, before dismissing them. Suddenly, the Knave of Hearts enters and kisses the Queen's hand, before asking who Alice is. She introduces Alice as "Um," then orders her soldiers to bring in the Hatter, who is now a prisoner.
When the Hatter kneels in front of the Queen, she asks him where Alice is, and he tells her he's been considering a number of different words that begin with the letter M, but gives no answers about Alice's whereabouts. The Queen threatens to behead the Hatter, and he laughs, telling her that he would like to make a hat for her very large head, admiring it.
The Queen is flattered by the Hatter's admiration for her large head, and allows him to be unchained in order to make her a hat. The knave breaks his chains with the vorpal sword and the Hatter begins to manically list a number of different kinds of hats. The Queen dismisses her courtiers and smiles at the Hatter.
Bayard goes to the palace of the White Queen, who welcomes him and asks what news he has. He tells her that Alice has returned to Wonderland and is at the Red Queen's castle, apologizing for letting Alice go off-script. However, the White Queen is not upset about this, as she knows that at the castle, Alice will be able to procure the vorpal sword.
Outside in the Red Queen's garden, Alice encounters the hedgehog from earlier, who directs her towards the Hatter's hat nearby.
That evening, the Red Queen tells the Knave that he must find Alice as soon as possible before her sister, the White Queen, does, and the White Queen's people rise against her. "Why did they adore her, but not me?" the Red Queen moans about the popularity of her sister. As she does so, the white rabbit sneaks into the Red Queen's room and listens in. The Knave alludes to the fact that the Red Queen killed her husband, the King, for falling in love with the White Queen. Unnoticed, the white rabbit steals the oraculum from the Queen's table. The Queen hugs the Knave as the rabbit scurries out of the room.
Alice goes to the Hatter's room that evening, where she admires the hats he makes. "It's just a pity you have to make them for her," Alice notes, which upsets the Hatter, who feels he has betrayed his cause. He begins thrashing at his work, but Alice calms him down. "Have I gone mad?" he asks her, and Alice says exactly what her father said to her all those years ago, "I'm afraid so...but I'll tell you a secret: All the best people are."
The Hatter smiles at Alice as she puts his hat on his head. "You look yourself again," she tells him, when suddenly the Queen begins calling for her hat. The Hatter whispers to Alice that the Queen keeps the vorpal sword in a cupboard and that the rabbit will help her, urging her to find it and take it to the White Queen. Before she goes, he smiles at her and says, "Why is it you are always too small, or too tall?"
Alice goes down the hallway and finds the Tweedles and asks where the Rabbit is. They point in opposite directions, before taking her down some long hallways to find him. When they find the rabbit, he is with the dormouse, and Alice tells them that they need to find the vorpal sword.
The rabbit takes Alice to the chamber where the sword is hidden, a strange outbuilding in a square outside. As she walks towards it, the rabbit tells her to be careful, and as she peers into the building, she sees the Bandersnatch sleeping inside. "I'm not going in there," she says, showing the Rabbit her scratch, which has only gotten worse, it seems. When the rabbit faints from fear, Alice goes to find the dormouse and asks if he still has the Bandersnatch's eye. He does, and Alice takes it from him.
Further down the hall, Alice runs into the Knave, who pushes her up against the wall and tells her that he likes her and her largeness. She pushes him away and continues back to the Bandersnatch. Meanwhile, a female courtier watches their interaction and smirks to herself.
Alice goes to the Bandersnatch and tells him she has his eye. The Bandersnatch growls, but when Alice rolls the eye towards him, he accepts it and she goes to look for the sword, which she finds in a nearby case. After the Bandersnatch pops his eye back in, Alice tries to open the case where the vorpal sword is kept, but cannot, as her scratch hurts too badly. Defeated, Alice falls asleep.
Inside, the Queen tries different hats on. Meanwhile, one of her courtiers' prosthetic nose falls off, and the Hatter whispers to her that she might want to pick it up. Behind her is another courtier, who is wearing padding to make himself look obese. Another of the courtiers whispers in the Queen's ear and the Queen becomes very angry.
The next morning, Alice wakes up in the Bandersnatch's hut. Around his neck is a key, which she uses to open the chest to the vorpal sword. The Bandersnatch then licks the scratch he gave her, and it magically heals considerably. With the vorpal sword in tow, Alice goes back into the castle.
Analysis
At this point in the journey, Alice becomes exasperated with how much other people (and animals) are telling her what to do. The predestinated path specified by the oraculum begins to try Alice's patience, and when Bayard the bloodhound reminds her that the Frabjous Day is approaching, on which she must slay the Jabberwocky, she fires back, "From the moment I fell down that rabbit-hole, I've been told what I must do and who I must be. I've been shrunk, stretched, scratched, and stuffed into a teapot!" When Bayard protests, she tells him, definitively, "I make the path!" Suddenly, we begin to see a new Alice emerge, one who is more confident, assured of her own powers, and ready to fight back. Ironically enough, the more Alice resists the scripts being handed to her, the more she begins to resemble the Alice shown in the illustrations of the scroll.
Alice's insistence that she herself is the path hearkens back to her father's ethos from the beginning of the film. Mr. Kingsleigh was a man who did not think much of convention and never wanted to do anything conventionally. His ideas, as shown in the first scene, were often met with skepticism by his peers, but he forged his own path nevertheless, accomplishing the impossible and urging his daughter to follow her own self-direction as well. Alice invokes her father's memory when she accesses her own inner strength with Bayard.
What is notable about Alice's heroism initially is the fact that when she elects to go and save the Hatter, she is considerably smaller than her normal size. Her growing fierceness and bravery are inversely proportional to her physical size. While we doubt that she can be very effective at her height, as she makes her way to the castle, her tininess becomes one of her strengths—her ability to squeeze through small spaces, to become discreet, to insert herself into situations unnoticed is a boon rather than a nuisance.
Almost as soon as she has snuck into the castle, Alice trades her tiny stature for an enormous one, when she eats the cake that the rabbit gives her. Towering over the Queen, Alice lies about her identity, and just on the basis of her size is allowed to enter the court as one of the Queen's favorites. The Queen is a capricious and changeable woman, who needs little encouragement to welcome Alice in as her favorite based on minimal information. Once inside the castle, it becomes Alice's job to keep her identity a secret from the court.
While Alice tends to procuring the vorpal sword at the Red Queen's castle, Bayard the bloodhound visits the angelic White Queen at her castle to deliver the news that Alice is working to undermine the Red Queen. The White Queen is a benevolent and dulcet-voiced monarch, who assures Bayard that, although Alice has diverged from the story of the scroll, she is doing what is right and what will allow her to find the vorpal sword. The White Queen represents everything the Red Queen does not: beauty, kindness, generosity.
