Summary
The Knave pleads for mercy from the Red Queen, who grills him about his admiration for Alice. To save his own position, the Knave tells the Queen that it is Alice who is obsessed with him, not the other way around. Turning red again, the Queen screams, "Off with her head!"
When Alice goes into the Hatter's lair with the vorpal sword, he tries to tell her that she can only use the sword to slay the Jabberwocky, when they are interrupted by the Knave who orders Alice's arrest for "unlawful seduction." The Hatter throws various hat-making items at the soldiers and the Knave, instructing Alice to go to the White Queen, but Alice tells him she will not leave without him.
As the Knave and the Hatter struggle, the dormouse suddenly tells Alice to run, revealing her name to the Knave. Alice flees the room as the Knave orders soldiers to seize Alice, and they surround her in the square, grabbing her. Just before they can bring her into the castle, the Bandersnatch busts out of his hut, Alice climbs aboard, and they run away to the White Queen's castle. On the way, they pass Bayard, who joins them.
The Knave tells the Red Queen that Alice has escaped on the Bandersnatch with the vorpal sword, and she slaps him with every new revelation. The Queen is furious and orders for the Hatter and the dormouse to be beheaded.
Alice arrives at the palace of the White Queen, who welcomes her graciously and takes the vorpal sword from her, pleased that it has been returned to her. "Now all we need is a champion," says the White Queen, smiling at Alice, and noting how large she is, before bringing her into a kitchen where the March Hare is cooking furiously. The White Queen concocts a potion for Alice and asks about her sister, the Red Queen.
"I think she may have some kind of growth in there, something pressing on her brain," says the White Queen about the Red Queen, and assures Alice that when she slays the Jabberwocky, the people will rise up against the Red Queen. She gives Alice a spoonful of potion, which Alice drinks, returning to her regular size.
The White Queen then escorts Alice to the garden, where Alice finds Absolem, the caterpillar, smoking on top of a hedge. "Who are you?" he says again, and Alice reminds him that she is the wrong Alice. "How do you know?" he asks, suspiciously, and informs Alice that she is much more the right Alice than she was before. "You're almost Alice," he says.
"I couldn't slay the Jabberwocky if my life depended on it," Alice tells Absolem, to which he replies, "It will," and recommends she keep the vorpal sword on hand for when the moment arises on the Frabjous Day. "You seem so real, sometimes I forget that this is all a dream," Alice says, as the caterpillar blows smoke in her face.
Back at the Red Queen's castle, the Hatter is locked up in a cell, where he is visited by the Cheshire Cat. The Cheshire Cat asks for the Hatter's hat, but the Hatter insists that he wants to keep the hat for his execution.
In the square, the Queen tells her courtiers, "I love a morning execution," as her knights prepare the executioner's block, and the Hatter and dormouse are brought out in chains. The Hatter lays his head down on the block and tells the executioner that he wants to keep his hat on. The executioner agrees, and goes to chop off his head. When he does so, however, the Hatter disappears and his hat goes flying into the air.
Suddenly, the Cheshire Cat's head emerges from the hat, and it becomes clear that he has been masquerading as the Hatter the whole time. The Hatter emerges from behind the Queen's throne and accuses all of her courtiers of pretending to have large features. The courtiers begin ripping off their prosthetic noses, ears, etc. and accusing one another of being disingenuous, much to the Queen's dismay.
She orders for them to be beheaded, as the Hatter makes his way down to the square where he addresses the crowd and urges them to rise up. They cheer with him, as the Queen orders for the Jubjub bird to be released. The Jubjub bird swoops down, screeching, and attacks the citizens. "Prepare the Jabberwocky for battle," the Red Queen whispers to the Knave.
Meanwhile, back at the White Queen's castle, Alice asks her why she doesn't slay the Jabberwocky herself. "It is against my vows to harm any living creature," the White Queen says, before looking through a telescope and noting that the Hatter, the Tweedles, the dormouse, and the rabbit are all approaching. Alice holds the telescope up for Bayard to see, and he is overjoyed to see his wife and pups coming towards the castle.
The White Queen, Alice, and Bayard go to greet their visitors. The Cheshire Cat delivers the Hatter's hat and asks Alice about her arm. She tells him that it has healed and he disappears.
That evening, Alice stands on the balcony, where she is approached by the Hatter, who asks her once again, "Have you any idea why a raven is like a writing desk?" He reminds her that tomorrow is the Frabjous Day, and she bemoans the fact that she hasn't woken up from her dream of Wonderland yet. The Hatter is disappointed to hear that he is not real, that he is a figment of Alice's imagination, and she tells him she will miss him when she wakes up.
The next day, when the rabbit asks a crowd who will step up as the champion for the White Queen, the Hatter steps up, before soon getting interrupted by the Cheshire Cat, who also wants the title. After the dormouse and the Tweedles have also volunteered themselves, the rabbit unrolls the oraculum, where the illustration shows that Alice is the rightful champion. "If it ain't Alice, it ain't dead," says one of the Tweedles, and the White Queen tells Alice that the choice must be hers. Alice runs away, frightened.
On a nearby veranda, Alice weeps about what she must do. "Nothing was ever accomplished with tears," says Absolem, hanging in a cocoon from a nearby vine. "Why are you all wrapped up?" Alice asks him, and he tells her that he is going to transform. "I need your help, I don't know what to do," Alice pleads with him, but he fires back, "I can't help you if you don't know who you are, stupid girl."
Miffed, Alice tells the caterpillar who he is, and he reminds her that she has been here once before, when she was little. We see a flashback of Alice in Wonderland the first time, meeting the Cheshire Cat, taking tea with the Mad Hatter and March Hare, painting the Red Queen's roses red. Suddenly, Alice realizes that Wonderland is not a dream at all, but a real place she has visited before.
"Remember, the vorpal sword knows what it wants. All you have to do is hold onto it," Absolem says, before disappearing into his cocoon.
The Red Queen and her army make their way towards the White Queen. At the White Queen's castle, the Bandersnatch emerges from the castle to help the cause, with Alice on its back. The White Queen's army marches. The two armies meet at a large chess board, and the two dueling sisters approach one another.
Analysis
The stakes rise and matters get much more chaotic in this section of the film. Alice makes an unexpected alliance with the Bandersnatch when he gives him back his eye, but she also makes enemies in the court of the Red Queen, first when she is framed by the Knave for seducing him, and then when her true identity is accidentally revealed by the dormouse. No longer able to live in the court undercover, Alice manages to escape the castle on the back of the Bandersnatch, and makes her way to the White Queen's castle.
A major theme in the film is identity, as a large concern for Alice is whether she is the "right" Alice, the Alice that slays the Jabberwocky according to the prophecy. Her shirking of this identity upon arrival has to do with her resistance to its deterministic logic and her insistence that she is the one who is dreaming and by extension gets to make her own decisions about what she will do. As she spends more time in Wonderland, however, she starts to fit the bill of the brave warrior more and more. This journey of self-actualization is a psychological one as much as it is a physical one, as Alice becomes more and more comfortable in herself and her power, and begins to assume a more confident and strong-minded identity. As she settles down into her normal size, neither too large nor too small, she also begins to settle down in her identity, integrating the individualistic part of herself with the dutiful part, the part which must slay the Jabberwocky and save Wonderland.
Absolem, the blue, hookah-puffing caterpillar emerges as the wisest character in the film, even if he is a little sarcastic and unfriendly. His uttering of the famous Lewis Carroll line attached to his character—"Who are you?"—becomes a kind of meditation on the status of Alice's self-actualization. He knows precisely who Alice is, but he wants to make sure that she knows it as well. As he coaches Alice through what she must do, he becomes a kind of sarcastic and exasperated guru figure.
The Cheshire Cat comes to the rescue at exactly the right moment, and his shape-shifting abilities allow for the Hatter to escape from bondage and turn the courtiers in the Red Queen's castle against their Queen. After revealing to the Queen that her courtiers have pretended to have large features in order to gain favor with their big-headed monarch, the Queen becomes incensed, and loses grip of some of her power. The Queen is such a tyrannical and unjust ruler, however, that it does not take long for her subjects to turn on her, and join the Hatter's revolution.
In this section it is revealed to Alice that the reason everything seems so familiar is that she has been there before, and the fantastical world she has stumbled upon is not a dream at all. In a flashback, we see Alice in Wonderland as a young girl, meeting all the various characters for the first time, and it is in this moment that Alice realizes that she is not as mad as she thought. After all her protestations and insistence that she is in a dream, Alice is reminded of who she is, and shown that those impossibilities that she has long imagined were fanciful figments are in fact just as real and important as her reality.
