When Abraham Lincoln said over 150 years ago, “What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself,” he could have easily been talking today about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. The quote certainly provides some insight into how one of the year’s most anticipated films ended up as such a dud.
Is there anyone in the country who hasn’t been bombarded with images from the movie for months leading up to Friday’s premiere? Last year, Disney ran several pages of photographs in major magazines: Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, resplendent in white face, orange hair and liquid green eyes; Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, all forehead and heart shaped lips. For months, movie posters of the Mad Hatter were plastered all over town, even making the front page of the Los Angeles Times on opening day.
Remember how amazed we were when we first saw those publicity photos? The intensely saturated colors, the odd characters in their outrageous costumes. We were astounded at their beauty. We felt like Alice seeing Wonderland for the first time. But then we saw them everywhere, from bus shelters to billboards. And then again and again and again until soon we didn’t bother to give even Johnny Depp a second glance as we waited for the bus.
The story of Alice and her adventures in Wonderland is widely known, thanks in large part to that other Disney movie. For any remake of Alice to succeed, there needed to be something fresh and truly captivating to keep the audience interested. I think Burton was hoping his outlandishly decorated characters would provide that hook. He might have been right once upon a time. Imagine if we had seen Burton’s Mad Hatter, Twiddle Dum and Twiddle Dee and the Red and White Queens for the first time last week. What a different movie we would have seen. But instead our familiarity with those characters bred our contempt and took all of the fun out of the movie. It seemed tired and old and even …bad.
Contrast this to Avatar. The plot of that movie was also one that has been rehashed often, but the images we saw on screen were new and magical. The exotic features of the Navi people, so deeply blue and graceful, captivated us. We didn’t even realize that the plot was just mediocre. We were awed by the spectacle. But would we have been so enraptured if Navi action figures had been released a year ago?
It’s too bad for Alice in Wonderland that Lincoln was right. What killed this skunk was too much of its own publicity. But that’s not Burton’s fault. He turned in a creative movie complete with outrageously costumed actors that might have happily taken us down the rabbit hole. If only Disney hadn’t let the Cheshire cat out of the bag so soon.
