Hail to guardian.co.uk for making a duller than dull Thursday totally awesome. On this afternoon’s front page is a teaser trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice interpretation, which is due for release on 5 March 2010. The recently released promotional stills for the film are magnificent and this trailer just makes the anticipation all the more unbearable! Unseen characters revealed in the trailer include the Cheshire Cat (voiced by Stephen Fry), the Jabberwocky (Christopher Lee) and exciting new cast revelation: Crispin Glover as the Knave of Hearts. The comments provoked by the teaser have already divided the troops in true Burton fashion: it’s the cult of Burtonesque, members of which thrive on the director’s outrageous imaginings and eccentricity **Yay** versus the cult of WTF?, whose members have been sent into a royal panic over the impending corruption of a modern classic as well as Burton’s ‘lack of originality’ in interpreting an already existing piece of literature **Boo**. The cult of we don’t care will merely be stampeded in the impending war of cinematic opinion **shame**. Burton is a master of satire and social commentary, and is thus more than aptly suited to the task of Alice. Lewis Carroll’s story has become a modern fairytale, and the great thing about fairytales is that they are reinvented as each generation passes. The lessons taught and the observations made are adapted to suit the context of the time in which the story is told, the historical context forming the foundation of all interpretations and adaptations. In his Alice mythology, Lewis Carroll challenged the unimaginative stoicism of nineteenth century England, an attitude that stagnated and thus permeated subsequent generations. If Burton is able to continue Carroll’s legacy by confronting a culture of rigidly inescapable tradition, then the director has succeeded.

It can only be described as torture! Pure, unadulterated, pain-inflicting torture. My brain was sent into a frenzy of excitement when I laid eyes on the first pictures (released June 22) of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland adaptation. And then the anticlimax of a lifetime! The film is to be released in March of next year. Let me repeat that: the film is to be released in March of next year. How am I supposed to handle the suspense after glimpsing the film’s spectacular Burtonesque vision? The waiting is torture. Pure, unadulterated, pain-inflicting torture. (more…)