Very well executed

A lot of fun.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Tideland (2005) looks to Alice with respect so it seemed worth looking and it was not so long before I found a copy of Wonderland, just I am way past the point were I could find this easy to read. Novels of 1860ish were often read little bits at a time, as with bedtime stories for the rather little? Tina Majorino. Corrina and Santa Fe. These are not stories for kids, as I had hoped. Find the Majorino version of Wonderland I should not expect it to be a story for kids but I should expect it to be a story that tries to have something worthwhile to say. Wonderland is widely quoted in features. The hypermarket copy of Alice, nicely low cost, the Majorino version too. Tideland had told me that it was worth trying to get to know this story and this DVD was the key I needed for approaching the novel. Add that this feature is Babelsberg, their Back To The Secret garden is one that I return to more than most features despite the deliberate flaws in the dining room scenes. Could be that they tried to specialise in here and now sort of stuff. * The feature starts off in a way that shows promise to me. Agony too, what early teens with a sense of dignity would not prefer to run rather than go through with singing such a song? Cherry Ripe. The feel of the start reminds me of Pit and the Pendulum applied to Bar Mitzvah, a useful allusion in helping me to start appreciating Alice. Lots of detail in the opening pointed to detail in the story to come, this Alice as a reflection of the real world as shown at the start and the end. Except that it is a reflection. Wonderland is reached by the Rabbit hole to give a world that is up side down. Looking Glass gives a back to front view. If this story does give survival hints then they will likely be convoluted? Down side. Not long into the story I was needing to concentrate more, as if this is also not so easy to read. Chunks do not have the immediacy that the best stories have made one expect, though bits with immediacy do keep on cropping up so it is a case of knowing that they are there and being prepared to try to not drift off beforehand. My own guess is that this might relate to this adaptation keeping to the novel too closely, in parts. Just a guess. A bigger reason is that in these up side down worlds one can get one's concentration messed up, real bad. A complication. I watch this in order to try to get to appreciate the novel and a key way I did that here, after seeing it all the once, was going through this slowly to try to write my own set of chapters. I got the impression that the DVD chapters did loosely follow the book chapters, my DVD version's chapter 8 matching chapter 8 of the novel. Just at chapter 10 the feature changes track and covers three chapters of Looking Glass before returning to Wonderland. Could be that those three give useful supplementary detail, just I find this story to take work from me, I would actually have preferred it to keep to normal feature length and just the Wonderland novel. Except that this meant that I have now skimmed a freeware e form of Looking Glass so I know that it includes stuff that I have never read or seen. I am getting the impression that Carroll has a lot of experience of the up side down worlds. He also has fluency for writing a range of fictional scenarios. But does he believe that there is an escape route or has he not found one at this stage, that is the main detail that I looked for in this story. I assume no, but that he has been able to adapt well.

My Take: A visually-entertaining made-for-TV effort.When I watched this movie when I was a kid, I really loved it. And it didn't differ when I grew up. I still love this movie. It's so abundant in ideas and imaginative wonder, also sharing the imagery of Lewis Carroll's classic story. It stars a very familiar cast. Their's Miranda Richardson (Queen of Hearts), Christopher Lloyd (White Knight), Ben Kingsley (Sgt. Caterpillar), Robbie Coltrane (Ned Tweddledum), Martin Short (Mad Hatter), Gene Wilder (Mock Turtle), Pete Postletwaite (Carpenter), Peter Ustinov (Walrus) and of course, Whoopi Goldberg as the mysterious Cheshire Cat. Tina Majorino is perfect as Alice, with a fine British accent to fit her role. I remember seeing her younger in Kevin Costner's "Waterworld", but she was quite memorable, for me, in this film. The strange creatures and make-up effects are great too, as supplied by the artists at Jim Henson's Creature Shop. Not the best in a long line of 'Alice' adaptations, but it's curious settings and trippy characters is faithful to the pages of Carroll's classic story. TV movie rating: ***1/2 out of 5.

When I was 17, even though I was already reading Harrold Robbins, William Burroughs, Iceberg Slim, I also had developed a fascination for the Alice books. Couldn't quite put my finger on it. Course, when I turned 24, I discovered a take on Lewis Carroll that I would have never guessed in a million years, something that justified my re-reading the books with this new knowledge. It was mostly the revelations of his metaphores. The garden Alice was trying to get into, the unexplained growing up and growing down, the idea of the oppressors being "nothing but a pack of cards"...I won't mention what they represent as I am under a restrictive mandate to maintain the secret but it definitely changes the whole picture.This movie followed the book to a certain extent...I'm not crazy about the blending of both stories into one, to tell you the truth. It loses it's thematic thread. That is, one story is essentially about a card game, the other is about a chess game. Who plays chess and poker at the same time? Many of the scenes were surprisingly hilarious. Robbie Coltrane and George Wendt's part as Tweedledee and Tweedledum was a standout. Martin Short literally SHONE in his big courtroom scene. And the scene where Alice comes across the Duchess and her cook for the first time was excellent.However, what was particularly odd was that on the DVD, there were short bios for the main actors...and they said NOTHING about Tina being in Napolean Dynamite, they didn't breathe a WORD about Robbie Coltrane's recurring role in the Harry Potter movies...was this some kind of weird English idiosyncrasy? Then I noticed that this movie was made in 1999, way before those movies I mentioned were ever done. Still, the DVD was made AFTER them, right? You'd think they'd give a backstory.

The story will be familiar to most. Dreading a singing recital at her parents' lavish home, Alice falls into a strange world in pursuit of a large White Rabbit. The talented child actor Tina Majorino (Corrina, Corrina, Napolian Dynamite) plays Alice with all the good graces but mostly wanders through strange, hallucinogenic journeys that take her to strange places, has her shrink and then grow very large, and leads her to meet all sorts of surreal characters...Carroll's tale of whimsical, illogical adventures is a field day for designers, the costumes and makeup are extremely well done, and the special effects are of the usual high standard you would expect from Jim Henson's Creature Shop. But this production is all dressed up without anywhere worthwhile to go. Influenced by Time Bandits and Labyrinth, the film has a splendid array of effects, many dealing with multiple perspectives...The highlights are Whoopi Goldberg as the Cheshire Cat, a seamless mix of cat and comic. Martin Short as the Mad Hatter. And Mirandra Richardson as the Queen of Hearts, who has put a memorable, if not piercing, personal stamp on the line, "Off with his head". She must say it sixty times during the movie...The show is not for all tastes, particularly if your idea of Alice in Wonderland is solidly fixed upon Disney's very different if unjustly maligned 1951 animated feature. If you're in the right frame of mind, however, Miller's Alice works wonderfully well….