Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Alice in Wonderland
2010 · Tim Burton · Alice in Wonderland on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch Alice hold still while the room changes size. (staging)
When she shrinks, Burton keeps Wasikowska steady and swells Underland and Colleen Atwood's dress around her until she is standing inside a tent made of her own clothes.
Payoff: The scale gags are about who has control, not about size. Alice becomes something the world is doing. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the character goes still and the setting takes the movement over.
Watch the color change as Alice moves between the courts. (light)
Dariusz Wolski lights everything high-key and storybook-clear. The Red Queen's ground runs on decayed pastels and gray, the White Queen's brightens toward pale, and Atwood dresses each to match.
Payoff: The film sorts its sides by palette, so you always know whose ground you are standing on. In the reading: affective color. The reading calls this affective color: color used as argument, absorbing a whole court into one feeling.
Watch Depp's face shift color and mood mid-sentence. (performance)
The Hatter's eyes are digitally enlarged and his complexion changes as he swings between Scots-edged menace and childlike hurt. The close-up is finished after the shooting, in post.
Payoff: Feeling here is partly rendered rather than only acted, which was new for a face at this scale. In the reading: icon of power. The reading calls this a potisign: a face flickering through small intensities instead of settling into one expression.
Listen for Elfman's wordless choir returning as Alice's music. (sound)
Danny Elfman writes her a recurring cue of wordless voices over music-box delicacy and brings it back at every turn of her story. It is the most Burton-like element in the film.
Payoff: The melancholy here arrives through the score rather than through anything in the design.
Watch how little Wasikowska reacts to the wonders around her. (performance)
She plays Alice watchful and faintly put out rather than wide-eyed, with resolve kindling slowly. The spectacle keeps escalating around a deliberately grounded center.
Payoff: Her stillness is the one fixed point on offer, which is how you keep your bearings in Underland.
Once you have seen it
Watch how early the prophecy scroll settles the plot. (structure)
Linda Woolverton replaces Carroll's drift with a hero's journey. A document states what Alice will do on the Frabjous Day, and the film spends its length catching up to a text written before she arrived.
Payoff: The pressure that summons this hero is lore rather than a place, which is how blockbusters have worked ever since.
Track how each encounter pushes toward the same battlefield. (cutting)
Chris Lebenzon cuts the Rabbit, the Tweedles, the Caterpillar, the tea party and both courts as way stations converging on one fight, then assembles the Jabberwocky combat in fast modern coverage.
Payoff: Carroll's episodes stop being detours and become stops on a route with a single destination.
Watch Rickman's Caterpillar refuse to hurry for anyone. (performance)
Alan Rickman voices Absolem unhurried and unimpressed while the plot presses forward around him. The tea party behaves the same way, going nowhere with complete confidence.
Payoff: These are the scenes where nothing gets accomplished, and they run on a different clock from the rest.
Look at how the Red Queen's court is staged small. (staging)
Her court plays as a theater of cruelty in miniature, all petulance and scale tricks, while Hathaway's White Queen floats through open pale rooms as an arch parody of grace.
Payoff: The two courts are built as opposites in every dimension, so the choice between them is made for you.
Carry this in: Watch who is moving in each scene. Often it is the world changing size while Alice stands still inside it.