Alice in Wonderland

It was once just the dream of design students in Liverpool, but now – after much-hyped delay – Tim Burton's film version of Alice in Wonderland has finally reached UK cinemas.

At the Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts a few years ago, I saw the results of work by design students imagining what would happen if Tim Burton directed an adaptation of this classic Victorian tale. Naturally, the real thing is much more overstated and far zanier. This is Tim Burton, after all. Both Wonderland and the Victorian world which contrasts with it take flamboyance very seriously.

But let's be clear early on – Linda Woolverton's screenplay is far from faithful to the book's storyline (although certain things remain, like the drink and cake that make Alice change size, and the infamous white rabbit), and never pretends to be. From the outset, we have Alice as a young girl troubled by nightmares involving creatures vaguely recognisable from Lewis Carroll's story, but that soon changes. We zip forwards thirteen years to be shown the nineteen-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) subject to the strictures of a Victorian society that insists she conform. Like so many teenagers after her, she refuses to do so, and the early hints of her mental instability (hallucinations?) come to the fore as she runs away from the pressure of an unwelcome proposal.

So, not a dream on a pleasant summer's day then. It's also much darker than the 1951 cartoon film, which established Disney's tradition (unrelated to Carroll's work) of a blonde Alice in a blue dress. Thank goodness for that, as Burton gives a much deeper, much more troubled Wonderland than earlier versions.

Burton's film may have departed from the letter of Carroll's book, but not the spirit. What has always made Alice in Wonderland so tricky to classify as a children's book is that it is so subversive. For example, Alice takes on trust the bottle marked 'Drink Me'...surely a contradiction of any parent's instruction to their child should they find a strange bottle of liquid. She takes and eats mushrooms from a caterpillar (a stranger!) who is quite clearly on drugs and not in his right mind. She rebels against the authority in Wonderland. Yet she is a children's heroine. Burton might not stick to that outline, but he does allow some very subversive stuff to creep in. His Alice is a visionary in a society of pragmatists. Tied down by other people's expectations (an audience for when Hamish (Leo Bill) proposes?), she runs away into a dream land of her own making. Like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, that dream world helps her make decisions about the real world. By the end, she – not unlike Alan Rickman's Caterpillar – has metamorphosed into an independent, determined young woman.

In fact, this radically departs from the original text, not only in its conflation of Alice in Wonderland with its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass. With the introduction of the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) as a rival to the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and a plot taken from Carroll's poem The Jabberwocky (written as part of the Wonderland books), Burton turns this into much more of an epic film. It suddenly becomes about usurping and rightful queens, champions and monsters, insanity and bravery. That may not be a bad thing, but it doesn't quite chime with what Carroll wrote.

However – in a way that feels classically Burton, and far from classically Victorian – Burton doesn't allow us an easy good vs. evil. His White Queen is just as dubious ruler as her sister, with personal loyalty based on apparent hypnosis and a willingness to place her own pacifist vows above the lives of her followers. She's not quite likeable, despite her mixture of Aslan with the Elves of Lothlorien, never mind the fact that she doesn't deny the Red Queen's claim of being the eldest of the sisters (therefore the rightful queen).

Unfortunately, a lot of visual eccentricity has gone into this film at the expense of the verbal fun Carroll had within his text. That seems to be the greatest loss going over to the big screen. That isn't to say that humour is lacking – a lot of the visual stuff is good and funny. Burton succeeds in creating visually striking and endearing characters (especially Johnny Depp's Mad Hatter, who can never quite decide if he's Scottish or not, and Bonham Carter is wonderful).

This has the cinematic quality and hallmarks of Burton, but is also a film that has learnt from the examples of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Narnia films. The ending has become a battle of good and evil, finally decided by a single, unwilling hero facing a monster.