Alice in Wonderland leaves viewers with the white rabbit in the room:

What was Burton thinking?

By Selena Fragassi
Published: March 7th, 2010 | 11:00pm

By the end of Alice In Wonderland, you had to wonder whether the re-imagined depiction of Lewis Carroll's classic tale was more an examination of Alice Kingsley falling down a rabbit hole or the echoes of director Tim Burton falling from grace. Ultimately, the final question after 120 chaotic minutes came down to—which character had really lost their mind?

By the time the Mad Hatter (played by Burton's perpetual muse Johnny Depp) breaks out into a spontaneously tacky jig at the culmination of Alice's (Mia Wasikowska) victorious battle and Avril Lavigne's voice, later, unceremoniously soundtracks the end credits, all fingers pointed to Burton whose obvious submission to the whims of the Disney regime knocked this charming art-maker off his steed.

With Alice in Wonderland, it's become clear that the storied director has chosen a new path for his career—instead of taking the road less traveled with artistically valued stories of the strange (Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas), he has opted for commercially-valued remakes that, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, bring in a producer's wonderland audience that includes both children and their parents.

Although Burton's animation strengths and novel visual conception paint a pretty picture in Alice, there's no substance to anchor the story—this being the complementary pair that so astutely highlighted his genius in previous films. Part of the problem may revolve around Burton's original issue with Carroll's story—that it was just about a "girl wandering around from one character to another"—and so, to fill the gaps, he focuses the narrative on the yawn-worthy territory battle of the red and white queens, played by Helena Bonham Carter and Anne Hathaway respectively.

So, instead of letting Alice lead us on a journey of the imaginative landscape of Wonderland, Burton (and screenwriter Linda Woolverton) put the now 19-year-old on the hunt, tagging her as a destined Joan of Arc whose entire mission is to defeat the evil Jabberwocky dragon and return the crown to the white queen. The Dungeons and Dragons plot was an amateur attempt at adventure that could have been birthed from the tutelage of M. Night Shyamalan. It skewers the story away from more interesting tethers: Moments with the Mad Hatter and Alice's backstory end up either rushed or ignored. For the short moments he was allotted, Depp himself couldn't really get a hold on the character, with a disappearing lisp, British/Irish identity crisis, and even slip-ups of Captain Jack.

Alice in Wonderland finishes where it started, in Kingsley's "real world," where she returns to her surprise and impromptu engagement party in a Wizard of Oz-like ("I hit my head ... and you were there, and you were there") moment. Just like the party guests, the viewer is left with many questions ... not for Alice, but for Burton.