Alice in Wonderland/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The book

  • When Alice grows too large in the White Rabbit's House why doesn't she use the fan again (like she did in the Hall Of Doors) to shrink herself?
    • As soon as she realized the fan was shrinking her, she threw it away and it was lost in the sea of tears.
      • Yes but she found another one in the White Rabbit's house.
        • Not the same fan, and thus unlikely to have the same results.
      • Except that the only reason she ate the carrot was under the reasoning that foodstuffs seemed to be having effects on her size. Wait, are we actually trying to bring logic into Alice in freaking Wonderland??!
          • Yeach, you guys are silly. Alice in wonderland is the antipathy to logic. :)'
          • Alice isn't from Wonderland. She still has logic.
  • Why does this book get so much Darker and Edgier stuff done to it?
    • I suppose its mostly because of the Mind Screw attached to the setting, or maybe because, frankly, the animated Disney version of the setting was quite dark and unusually unsettling for the kind of stuff Disney is most often associated with. The characters themselves, specially the Mad Hatter and the Queen(s), have qualities that make a darker and edgier interpretation seem not too far fetched.
    • Values Dissonance perhaps? In this day and age, people probably find the idea of a girl falling down a dangerously deep hole and wandering around aimlessly and alone with creatures that are either apathetic to her or want to kill her to be very dark and scary. It was probably put best in The Annotated Alice, when the Queen of Hearts first shows up. The annotation mentions that parents have worried about the effect such a murderous character would have on children, but kids themselves seemed quite at ease with her (while the annotation mentioned that adults on the other hand had best be kept away from the Queen).
    • Because madness is a common theme in the books, and madness/mental illness isn't the happy trippy funtimes that media likes to portray it as.
    • My favourite interpretation of the book is that it's about how scary and illogical the world really is. Alice questions who she is, she's aware of changes happening to her body and her mind but can do nothing about them, she has to humour people who she doesn't like or understand, and she's constantly making up her own rules about how to exist in Wonderland because she doesn't understand everyone else's. That's how most of us feel about growing up/starting a new job/starting a new relationship/meeting new people/going abroad etc. That's just my opinion though :)
  • Why is every single Alice "re-imagining" some variation on "OMG DA RED QUEN OF HARTZ IZ EEVIL AND ALIC MUST STOP HER AND STUF!!!1" How is it that the Wizard of Oz has so many good re-imaginings when all Wonderland re-imaginings are ripped off from American Mc­Gee?
    • Because the Queen of Hearts is the closest thing to an antagonist the series has, the Red Queen is probably in second, and people like to combine the stories.
      • Why do they always have to be a Composite Character, okay their both queens and red but can't one adaption have them as separate characters? Especially as one is from a deck of cards and the other from a chess set. Now that's a type of adaption I want to see.
        • If they made the Red Queen a villain, I'd imagine her being a calm and collected woman who is an evilly affible, manipulative bitch who is tricking Alice into becoming queen so she can intercept the white army in some way and win the battle. And she wouldn't be interested in chopping heads off and isn't as violent as the Queen of Hearts. Now that's a type of adaption I want to see.
  • Why the (please excuse my language) fuck is everyone convinced that the book is an hallucination by an insane woman, or a drug trip? WHY? Because it's fantasy? But why this book in particular? Why not Harry Potter or the Chronicles of Narnia or the Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan or the Spiderwick Chronicles or the Never Ending Story? Why can't anybody suspend disbelief and use their fucking imagination? No, everything needs to have a rational explanation, even Wonderland.
    • Its mostly because of how outright absurd it seems; from a generic person's view, having Earth's prehistory as magical, with medieval european looking civilisations, with elves, orcs and dwarves and with a fallen dark lord that once disguised himself as a bishounen to fool the elves or a multiverse with a god like particle of which angels are made and with armoured polar bears makes more sense, because as a whole things seem to follow a certain logic. Alice in Wonderland is not by any means logic, in fact its the opposite of it, not even having a recognisable plot, and thats what leads people to think it was the result of drugs, which is quite sad because Mind Screw is an awesome trope.
    • Not to mention the fact that the author was a known drug user and was possibly under the influence while coming up with the story. With that in mind its not that much of a stretch to think that the protagonist too would be under the influence.
      • I've never heard he was a drug user, and I've read several biographies. I think you've mistaken him for someone else.
      • Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) never used drugs. That is pure fiction. He was a surprisingly sane and logical fellow.
      • Although he might have been a paedophile.
      • The pedophilia is also entirely made up by misinformed biographers (and largely based in values dissonance) and any reliable source will tell you so.
        • Speaking of the false rumors of pedophilia, why don't people even mention that the entire book was based around trolling his students? Since from some records that he believed that the mathematics his students were thinking was pure lunacy.
    • Both stories are openly revealed as dreams, at the end. Dreams, hallucination, and madness are all akin.
    • But most people have dreams and they aren't mad. Though YMMV, I suppose.
  • Not necessarily about the book, but why don't we have a separate article for Through the Looking-Glass? It has the same number, if not more characters than the first book, is just as witty as it, and is quite possibly the first major Chess Motif in literature. (We have an article on The Hunting of the Snark, why not this?)
    • It is this troper's personal opinion that the two Alice stories are inseparable. You can't have one without the other. Besides, two separate articles would just confuse people who are unfamiliar with Alice.
    • Why not call it "Through The Looking Glass" with "Alice in Wonderland 2" as an alt title?
      • Because Alice In Wonderland 2 is not and never has been the tile of the story?
    • Many pages for films also include the sequels. The Hunting of the Snark is not really linked as closely to AIW as TTLG.
  • From the Black Comedy-example, exactly what is the dark joke Humpty Dumpty makes? The best I can guess is that Humpty suggests Alice that she should have asked someone to kill her on her seventh birthday, but it still doesn't seem quite right.
    • I guessed it was about aborting a baby.
    • That wouldn't account for the age of seven. It's exactly what it sounds like: Alice says she can't help growing up, and Humpty counters that she could if someone killed her.
    • It's definitely an allusion to dying/having someone kill you, but I seriously think Gardener was reaching on this point. As a lot of other examples show, people love stretching to find darkness in Alice in one way or another. Gardener's idea doesn't make much sense—people can commit suicide very well alone, possibly easier than they can find someone willing to kill them. Much more likely (in my opinion) is that the real joke there was Carroll playing on the use of 'one' as a pronoun—he was very fond of creative, illogical misinterpretations like that—and Gardener took it entirely the wrong way.

The Disney animated film

  • Regarding the animated Disney film: if the card soldiers would be killed for painting the roses red, why were they singing a song about it? That would be like going through Vichy France singing "Smuggling Jews into Spain, I'm smuggling Jews into Spain!"
    • No musical makes any sense. People don't just burst into song about their feelings or the events of their lives in the real world. Singing about painting the roses red is no more daft than anything else.
      • More to the point, one of the first lyrics they sing is "We dare not stop/or waste a drop". And yet they're splashing paint all over the place.
      • "We're all mad here."
    • It's Wonderland. THERE IS NO LOGIC OF ANY SORT!!!!
    • What always puzzled me about that part was that the singing voices of the cards are dubbed by the Mellomen, a singing quartet. But there are only three cards...
      • During Thurl Ravenscroft's first solo, it does look like a fourth card is randomly showing up. Doesn't explain how only three of them can sing four voices all together, though.
  • I saw a version of Monopoly starring the Disney Villains, and for some reason, the villain's spaces on the board game included one featuring the Mad Hatter. How exactly is the Mad Hatter supposed to be considered a villain?
    • I came across the same problem on a Disney Villian's towel I bought from Disney World. The Hatter was on it, and I couldn't figure why.
    • He's not a good guy, either in the original or the Disney version. At best he's an obstacle, at worst he's outright malevolent (he's repeatedly shown to be violent towards the Dormouse and March Hare, though the March Hare does throw a few jabs back, as well as wildly destructive) and simply hadn't turned on Alice yet. It's sort of a Historical Villain Upgrade as compared to most remakes and reimaginings giving him a Historical Hero Upgrade, when he's merely Grey morality of the Chaotic Neutral type. I don't know why they put him as a villain, since there is far from a shortage of Disney animated villains.
      • It bugs me that the Cheshire Cat and Hatter are "villains" when the Firebird or the abusive Stepmother aren't. 1951's Alice and 2010's are one in the same according to Disney, and the Hatter or Cat are not villains in Tim Burton's.
      • The firebird is a force of nature. Lady Tremaine is included in the villain line as often as not.
  • During the Walrus and the Carpenter bit: when the Tweedles say "But mother oyster winked her eye/and shook her heavy head/she knew too well this was no time/to leave her oyster bed", Mother Oyster looks over at a calender next to her, and the letter 'R' in the word "March" grows big and flashing red. Is this some kind of hidden joke that I'm simply too young to get?
    • Oysters can only be harvested, and therefore eaten, only part of the year. The general rule of thumb is any month with an R in it.
    • Or put more plainly, oysters are in danger during the colder months, when they can be kept cold (in the days before mechanical refrigeration) for a longer period of time. In the Northern Hemisphere summer months don't have an R in them. Read more here.

The Tim Burton film

  • What's with the names? I really have no problem with them, but why are they there? Why can't we just call a hatter the Hatter?
    • In the movie the characters have dialogue between each other and calling each other "Cheshire Cat", "White Queen", "Hatter", etc. would be excruciatingly annoying after a while.
      • ... why? That's what they called eachother in every other version of the story.
      • A mark of added realism and character depth—in the real world even people known by titles (like the Dalai Lama) have given names, and those who assume a name along with a title (like the popes) also have birth names. Giving names to the characters suggests a past, a history, and that they are real people. Of course whether that was an appropriate thing to do, particularly with a product like Alice in Wonderland where things don't make sense as a rule and the characters are in many ways archetypes, is another matter—but even if you think that was a bad or wrong reason to do it, that is still likely the reason.
  • More of a problem with the Fan Dumb than anything, but Johnny Depp's performance seemed to be pretty over hyped. His character seemed to be just a mish mash of Jack Sparrow and Sweeney Todd with not much feeling put into it. The fact that years before the movie released their only advertisement was JUST a picture of Johnny Depp sort of says it all.
  • The White Queen is an evil bitch. I won't muck up the main entry with this, since she seems to have quite the following there, but I can't help but think that Alice will be going back in a few years to support yet another rebellion against a power-mad queen ("I have sworn to never harm a living thing, but my torturers have taken no such vows! Oh, such dreadful violence, I can hardly stomach it! Now pull their nails out. Oh, how gruesome!")
    • That's what I like about the White Queen; her moral ambiguousness just makes things more appealing (or depressing, if you consider the rebellion was for nothing...)
    • I like the ambiguity about the White Queen too. I got the vibe that she knows she's crazy, realized she can't help it, but decided to be crazy in a way that won't cut off heads. She's the kind of crazy that inspires people to willingly follow her. She does at least seem to care for others, and even if it's all a cover to manipulate everyone to do her bidding with a flutter of her eyelashes, she is still an improvement over the Red Queen.
      • Anne Hathaway agrees. Quote: "She comes from the same gene pool as the Red Queen. She really likes the dark side, but she's so scared of going too far into it that she's made everything appear very light and happy. But she's living in that place out of fear that she won't be able to control herself."
  • I never really understood why the Hatter and Alice were supposed to be romantically involved. Their relationship to me seemed more paternal than romantic.
    • "Why must you always be the wrong size?" Said wistfully, to boot. That alone does it for the shipp- ew. You just gave me a horrible, horrible Alternate Character Interpretation involving your description of the Hatter's relationship with Alice, Getting Crap Past the Radar regarding Lewis Carrol's... infatuation, and the Wife Husbandry trope. Thanks, above troper. But I digress. Their relationship to me mostly seemed like nostalgic friendship with occasional hints of a little-kid style crush on the part of the Hatter (when she was nineteen, at least, the brief flashback wasn't very informative), vague sympathy/sense of purpose on the part of Alice until later on when she decided it wasn't necessarily a dream, and fire-forged something (still with the sympathy) towards the end.
    • Yeah, I agree. And kind of more paternal from Alice's direction than the Hatter's. Well, it sort of went both ways, a little, which I guess makes it more of a Like Brother and Sister thing. So I didn't see the whole Strangled by the Red String problem, because it seemed sort of as though she saw him as The Woobie. So it wasn't that she suddenly had deep feelings for a bizarre man who's twice her age under all that makeup, she just saw him as a friend and on top of that felt bad for him because he's the tragic, organic disorder version of his namesake trope.
    • Squicky as it may be, I interpreted him as being a fill-in for Lewis Carroll and most people these days interpret him as having been romantically interested in the real Alice, so yeah.
      • ...Why would the Hatter be his fill-in? There is very, very little similarity. Now, the White Knight from Looking Glass is REALLY blatantly so, but the Hatter does very little.
    • Ever since this troper left the theatre after first seeing the film, she has been convinced that the Hatter and Alice were meant to hook up. Then the troper read the original script, saw the written-out-of TWO "passionate, fiery kisses" and promptly had a Fridge Horror moment regarding Alice's earlier trips to Underland. There must have been a reason she forgot about them?
  • In the Tim Burton film, the futterwaken. Not only that it was a Non Sequitur Scene that makes anyone who preforms it properly look like the Japanese Ronald McDonald,but Alice's use of it at the end was... utterly pointless, even if you consider it to be a generic victory dance, unless you interpret it as her attempt to convince those present that she's mad, a sort of Refuge in Audacity (I thought at first that she was merely flaunting her lack of stockings).
    • I saw it as a Take That to everyone who expected her to do the "proper" thing at all times.
      • What bothered me was that there's already a 'mad dance' in the books, the Lobster Quadrille! It even has a song that goes along with it! Why, when inventing the dance Brick Joke, did they not just use the Lobster Quadrille? Why create a nonsense word where there's already one ready-made?
        • Because she would need at least one other person and two lobsters, of course.
        • Alice-of-the-film hates the Quadrille with a passion. Of course they couldn't have danced the Lobster Quadrille.
  • The Chosen One plot. Bloody hell. I know the original book was just sort of a bunch of random events and encounters, but of all the plots they had to bolt on to this thing, why that? ... Though the Jabberwocky was pretty badass.
    • Agreed. I enjoyed the setting and the characters; but I couldn't help but feel that there could be a better ultimate challenge for Alice than a standard kill-the-monster plot.
  • How the hell did a movie that's basically a love letter to macrophilia and the giantess fetish ever get past the Disney censors?
    • Considering that Lewis Carroll's repressed paedophilia is more or less a given these days, I imagine they thought it was an improvement.
    • A grand misconception more than a given: having a history of entertaining children does not make one a repressed paedophile.
    • Disney executives don't lurk in the dark corners of the internet?
      • Disney is known to get many a crap past the radar themselves.
    • Um...you act as if the growth and size change were only in this adaptation. It's in every adaptation, and in the original book as well. Yet I've never seen anyone accuse Lewis Carroll of have a macrophilia/giantess fetish (as opposed to the usual one someone above me just brought up)...
  • Trying to turn Alice into a proto-feminist role model.
    • I concur! That ruined the whole ending for me. Mind you, I'm a bit of a feminist myself, but I was like..."Uhm, no. Just no." It's absurd, at that point in history. Broke my Willing Suspension of Disbelief in half.
    • I'm a feminist, and while I liked Alice becoming a warrior (well, apart from the Cliché Storm involved), the epilogue was less credible than Wonderland. Sure, even in the 19th century, there were some possibilities for a woman (particularly a wealthy one) to get to do something else than get married, but becoming a merchant's apprentice and going to China? Yeah, right.
    • I'm a feminist also, but what Just Bugs Me is that Alice isn't warrior enough. She isn't supposed to be a proto-feminist role model, she's a girl who's trying to make sense of nonsense! In the books (and the original Disney film) she was more of a feminist because she challenged beliefs that didn't make sense. In Burton's version she's just going along with everything and insisting they've got the wrong girl even as she proves them right. The wrap-up at the end was pretty pathetic too - I mean, her character didn't change that much. She didn't fight the Jabberwock for herself, so why on earth would she have been altered by the experience? She fought because others wanted her to - not a very feminist idea. And then because of that, she suddenly has strength?
      • The White Queen makes a point of saying that it is her choice to fight it. Her following decision isn't really just because it's expected, it's also to protect the friends she has re-made since returning to this world. So, true, she's not fighting for herself specifically, but which is more worthy? That or fighting to defend those you care about (who, if we're getting philosophical, could also translate to one's ideals in this instance)?
    • I saw it as more of Alice getting in touch with her inner child. As a kid, she was imaginative and different, and then she grew up and felt pressure to be more "normal" and ladylike. Her trip to Wonderland, and her friendship with the Mad Hatter, inspires her to embrace her own quirkiness instead of trying to go along with other people's expectations.
    • Alice did not need to be made into a feminist. Tim Burton may consider her 'passive', but she is anything but.
  • Opening up trade with China. Were we supposed to think that Alice would be the cause (even if indirectly) of the ugliness of the Opium War, or was the writer really that naive?
    • It's a Historical In-Joke gone sour. Though whoever said Alice would be trading opium?
      • Opening a direct trade-route to China would result in the British Empire's attempts to open the country to further trade, eventually choosing a merchandise that they would have to buy. Alice herself doesn't need to do the opium-trading in order to bring about the circumstances where the opium trade became a viable political strategy.
    • "Alice" humiliates the Duke's son in public and the Duke ies her a job???
  • Does anyone else think the way Alice confronted her aunt about her imaginary prince was... something a bitch would do? There are better, less soul shattering and publicly humiliating ways to go about it.
    • It seems that the writers were trying to wrap up loose ends (very half-assed attempt, though).
      • Why did they need anything to wrap up, though? That entire character was pointless except for Alice's fear of becoming like her, and that doesn't require her to talk. I understand the rest of the confrontations-everyone else had been putting pressure on Alice (to marry Hamish, to not to her sister about her husband's philandering, and so on) and she was telling them to back off. But all the Aunt did was tell her to go away and leave her alone.
  • Granted, Johnny Depp is the biggest star in the world. But why is he the only name mentioned in the commercials, and given top billing?
    • You just answered your own question there.
  • Why did the Knave of Hearts beg the White Queen to kill him after he failed to kill the Red Queen? Sure, he had failed that attempt, but he's much bigger, stronger, and more well trained than she is. Plus, it's not like she's going anywhere.
    • Maybe because he doesn't like her and it's Rule of Funny
    • Maybe he didn't try to kill her, but himself?
      • Exactly.
  • If the Red Queen knew that Alice was destined to kill the Jabberwock on a certain day, why in the blasted infernal hells would she have the Jabberwock fight Alice on said day? Why not just stay home and wait until tomorrow? It's not like the White Queen was going anywhere.
    • Why do ANYTHING on ANY day, seeing as how according to that paper we already know what's going to happen every day for the rest of eternity. Honestly, an item like that which completely and utterly removes any kind of intensity is.. a bad move. If You Can't Fight Fate, what is the point of even trying?
    • Alternatively, it might be that the Queen was trying to assert her own power via a Screw Destiny. If the Jabberwock destroyed Alice on the very same day she was supposed to kill him (and that didn't seem a long stretch, prophecy or not, given that on one side we have a pyroelectric spitting dragon and on the other a young girl) surely the denizens of Underland would have lost all hope and will to fight back against the Queen. Alternatively, maybe the Red Queen was as much a skeptic as the Dormouse and also thought this was the wrong Alice.
    • Self-fulfilling prophecies are like that.
    • Because, as was pointed out above, the White Queen had said whether Alice would fight or not was her own choice. Despite the fact the Oraculum showed her fighting the Jabberwock that day, if Alice had continued to believe it was All Just a Dream or had otherwise chosen not to fight, the Red Queen would have won. By coming there she was simply counting on Alice continuing to remain oblivious and clueless, or at least neutral. The fact that Alice remembered her past visit, then decided to protect her old friends and be strong to embrace her destiny, fulfilled the prophecy—but not only did the Red Queen think that wouldn't happen, fate was not as ironclad as it appeared. Until the last moment, Alice still could have chosen not to fight. And as has been pointed out farther down, the Oraculum just shows her fighting, not winning. If she hadn't hung on to the Vorpal Blade as she'd been told...
  • When Alice first shrinks, it just bugs me how we never actually see her arms get out of the puffy sleeves. She never raised her arms, so it's like they just magically passed through the torso of her dress, which is ridiculous, even for Wonderland.
    • She just shrank that much. She gets small enough that her whole body could fit in that sleeve, you're expecting her arms to stretch far enough to fit through both of them? She gets skinnier, therefore farther from the sleeves. Her arms gets proportionally shorter. You do the math.
  • Why the crap are ALL the members of the tea party Scottish? In a world kind of based off England, there's a little bubble of Scotland just hanging out? Why? I mean, it kind of explains why the Hatter pulls out a fucking claymore during the final battle... but only in a roundabout way...
    • My Dad thought that the Hatter's Scottish split personality was Scottish because it was a reference to Scottish separatism and anti-monarchist sentiment of the time. I didn't know the March Hare was supposed to be Scottish, though.
  • Chessur says, rather bluntly, "You'll need someone with evaporating skills to tend that wound (from The Bandersnatch)" so, then, is The Bandersnatch a master of evaporation?
    • No, it's just got poisonous claws (either magically or naturally), or the wound had started festering to the point that Alice's own immune system or some medicinal skills wouldn't heal it. You don't need to grow penicillin in your nasal passages to sneeze on someone and give them a cold.
      • No, but the Bandersnatch DOES heal Alice's wound by licking it. HOW?
        • Ah. No, it's presumably a master at evaporation the same way termites are master architects, or sorcerors are different from wizards. It could be a master at evaporation magic, though, if it really is a being rather than just an intelligent beast.
        • That and a creature who spreads poison by scratching would presumably need to evolve either a resistance to or way to combat his poison, lest fleas would become a very deadly problem indeed. It's possible that bandersnatch saliva had evolved to the point of being able to chemically nullify any accidental scratches. He's not a master of evaporation, it's just that he's got the only antidote and it's not exactly easy to harvest so it wasn't a viable option.
        • Chessur wasn't saying evaporating skills was the only way to heal her wounds, just that that was what she would need. Why would she need it? Because he knew (or at least strongly believed) that the Bandersnatch could never be convinced to heal her itself with its antidote saliva, so his evaporation was the only method available to heal her. The unstated part of his sentence is "You'll need someone with evaporating skills to tend that wound [because the Bandersnatch certainly won't help you]." He didn't say that part because there was no point getting her hopes up with something he thought impossible. (He didn't count on the Androcles' Lion gambit.)
  • Just what the HELL happened to the Dodo?!?! After the Queen's croquet game, he just practically disappears of the face of Underland!!!! I was so happy that they included an under appreciated character in the film, and what do they do with him? Ignore him. He doesn't even show up in the final battle!!! Not to mention in the original script, he was supposed to be at the White Queen's castle. WHAT. THE. HELL?!?!
    • What would be the point in a minor character being in the final scene. Honestly what is the big loss, there was a lot of other characters who got less screen time than he did, who were more important in the books. Don't go crying over a dodo now.
      • I understand that. However, Tim Burton chose to include the Dodo, so he should have done a good job with what he had ... But he didn't ... that's what bugs me.
    • If you look closely in the scene where the Red Queen releases the Jub-Jub bird, you can see that the bird kills him. He's not at the White Queen's castle because he's dead!
      • Shoutout? The Dodo is considered the Author Avatar for Lewis Carrol. Maybe Time Burton felt he HAD to include him, but didn't really know what to do with him?
  • The Oraculum. With it there are no shortage of plotholes we could probably think up. Why were the characters having some sort of celebration when that scroll probably had a nice shiny picture showing the Jabberwock attack them?
    • Given that Absolem is the guardian of the Oraculum, and he doesn't seem prone to over-sharing information, perhaps it's on a need-to-know basis? It had to happen, so it did.
  • Why would it take the death of the Jabberwocky for everyone to turn against the Red Queen. It obviously wasn't at the castle and it looks like it would take a bit of time for it to wake up or move anywhere. The Red Queen is surrounded by people that hate her and can easily find weapons, can they honestly say that no one was capable of poisoning her or killing her in her sleep?
    • That would probably result in the Jabberwock going on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Bad idea.
    • Just my interpretation, but I was under the impression that the Red Queen's authority and power derived magically from the Jabberwock. Because the minute it was destroyed, we didn't see everyone run away, or immediately rise up against her—instead the cards lost their will to fight, the Knave lost what had seemed to be fanatical loyalty in favor of contempt and hatred, and even the Hatter stopped threatening the Knave, as if he no longer saw him or the Queen as threats anymore. Why this would be or how, I don't know, but it seemed that it wasn't just fear which compelled people to follow and obey her, but an actual magical compulsion. Perhaps the Power of Fear made literal?
  • "Underland". What's the deal with that? Why not just, y'know, call it what it actually is?
    • "Alice's Adventures Underground" was the original name.
  • Jabberwocky was the name of the POEM. The creature was called the JABBERWOCK. Come on fellas, you're losing your heads!
    • Also, why did the Jabberwock have to die? Why must the cool things always die?....
      • Because Destiny Says So. Deal with it.
      • "The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! He left it dead, and with his head he went galumphing back." Does this sound any familiar?
  • When talking to Absolum before going to slay the Jabberwocky, Alice expresses concern that he is going to die. Absolum is quite clearly forming a cocoon. Alice knows DAMN WELL that he's a caterpillar. Which raises the question: Why does a 19-year-old girl have no idea what a butterfly is?
    • You're applying logic to Wonderland. For all Alice knows, the absence of logic in Wonderland means that caterpillars don't turn into butterflies.
  • The fact that Tim Burton had admitted to never reading the books before he decided to make the movie, and then said he didn't like any other adaptations of the book. The reason he gave boiled down too, 'it's too nonsensical. there's no through-plot. alice is just an observer' (i can't find the exact quote) So basically, a man who never read the books and disliked the previous movies for being too nonsensical made a movie about it by imposing order on the chaos we all know and love. Why? He tried to 'improve' something that thousands and thousands of people love BECAUSE it's just nonsense!
    • Citation Needed. Can you show the article that has Burton admitting to never reading the books? Otherwise, there is no backup to support your complaint.
      • There isn't. The above quote is from him explaining why he didn't enjoy the book (he felt no emotional investment due to the lack of a running story), which kind of requires him having read them.
      • That's... even worse. So, you adapted a book you don't like into a movie and made it "better" by imposing a plot where there was none and missing the whole point of said book (being, there is no point)? It's like asking Yahtzee to make a J-RPG for you.
      • He didn't WRITE the movie, he just directed it. He was working with it from a script as a film.
  • So they get Christopher Lee to voice the Jabberwock(y). He gets two lines (which were thoroughly epic and something out of a fantasy masterpiece)...and then he is promptly struck dumb via tongue removal. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
    • They came up with two lines, and nothing more. So they decided to be cheap rather than doing an effort.
  • Why do people keep calling this a Disney movie/sequel to the Disney version? It was released by Disney, but I honestly don't think they had much to do with it. They're just taking advantage of the gold mine that is Tim Burton. And how is it possible that it's a sequel to the 50's version? They look nothing alike! I know canon can change slightly, but come on. They had flashbacks of Alice's first visit to Wonderland, and those memories looked nothing like the first movie.
    • Because Disney released it, and the flashbacks, despite showing a different looking world, clearly implied by their content that the events of the Disney movie were canon. A more accurate way to put it is that the movie is intended to be a sequel to the book (but which was adapted faithfully for the most part by Disney) which is set in the same world, gone Crapsack.
  • How did it get nominated for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy for the Golden Globes? I'm not saying it that it shouldn't win an award Best Motion Picture, it's just the category makes no sense.
  • Why does Tim Burton choose to ignore practically everything from the books? I swear, it seems a lot of Alice adaptations (apart from ones such as Pandora Hearts) just skim through the first book and the watch the Disney film. I was expecting Burton to make a film that would turn around all the misconceptions people have about the characters. Instead, he enforced them. Why did he even bother making it?
  • Why does everyone keep trash-talking this version of Alice in Wonderland? I honestly thought the Jim Henson version was way cornier. I'm not just saying that because the Tim Burton one had better special effects either.
    • It's not that the visuals are bad, it's that the plot is a mess.
      • My point remains though. To anyone who thinks Tim Burton's Alice is garbage, I kindly point you in the direction of the Jim Henson version. That right there is the truly inferior adaptation.
        • There being a worse version does not mean this version is not terrible. Most people don't complain about the Henson version because they aren't aware it exists.
    • It's because a number of people prefer to nitpick, read too much into,and/or otherwise gripe about something as opposed to just sitting back and enjoying it. Especially when it's something that has been adapted a number of times already, which sets a standard such people will put it against. But it clearly is a sequel to the base story, since she actually already knows almost everyone.
      • Because it's not a very enjoyable film. The plot is a cliché on top of a cliché, it doesn't stay true to the spirit of the original (hell, the grimdark American McGee's Alice manages this better) and the visual style is remarkably unimpressive considering the subject matter. There's a handful of cool characters, but they have nothing of interest surrounding them, people or scenery, and that is a crime in a movie about the friggin' Wonderland.
      • To add, I found the mad hatter's makeup very unnerving, they add a pop song at the end instead of Danny Elfman's music, the script writer wanted to make this a feminist film, and most of all, I'm getting tired of Burton redoing films instead of working on adaptations of things that haven't been filmed like his defunct Robert Ripley film or original stories like Nightmare Before Christmas. He feels the need to "improve" where it doesn't need to be in the first place. Though, I might be wrong in the future, and hope that one of my early inspirations gets back to doing original films in the future.
  • Just a really small one. Upon looking at the picture in the orraculem, why does everyone idmeadiatly assume that Alice will defeat the Jabberwock when it just shows her with the Jabberwock flying towards her? I mean in the flashback we saw another knight who took the same stance and he got flamed.
  • I know, I know, this is Wonderland, but you still gotta wonder. Apparently the Vorpal Sword is the only means to slay the Jabberwock(y) - "if it ain't Vorpal, it ain't dead". But ironically, to know this for sure, the only way would be to actually slay him. And de facto the dragon appears to have had at least an encounter with the blade, possibly more, but there he was standing in front of Alice, very much alive. So how would the denizens of Dreamland know the Vorpal Blade can kill him?
    • Unless that is no other weapon can even pierce his skin anyways.
    • Or unless he has in fact been killed but has regenerated through his own power or the Red Queen's - if he has that possibility, this would mean Alice's efforts were moot anyways.
    • Or that it had been foretold, apparently quite precisely.
    • The Jabberwock specifically calls the Vorpal Blade his "ancient enemy", with Alice a mere bearer. So yeah, either he's been killed and regenerated/resurrected before, or simply wounded by the only thing that COULD hurt him.
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