Alice in Wonderland

I should have been hard at work today, but I ended up doodling some "Alice In Wonderland" type doodles...

Many many many months ago, I wrote a blog post about my growing dissatisfaction with Tim Burton's films. Now that I've seen trailers and screenshots from his next movie, all those nasty feeling feelings are bubbling back to the surface again. I don't want to repeat myself by going off on another rant, but I will say one thing. I used to love Tim Burton's movies because his creepy, ghoulish sense of style also had a very appealing quality. But these days his films seem to have abandoned appeal in favor of a distorted, and frankly, ugly design sense. The images from his Alice movie had me squinting- I could tell where I was supposed to be enchanted, but it just looked... ugly. I read all sorts of comments from Burton fans saying that Burton's simply staying true to the book, and the book is very dark and twisted. Well, I've read the "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", and I fail to see how its dark and twisted. Its an amusing tale of nonsense peppered with nods to English culture from that time period, ranging from politics to schoolyard jokes. I guess since we're reading it out of its original context, the goings-on in Wonderland do seem trippy and psychotic (Just think of someone in a hundred years watching "Napoleon Dynamite" and trying understand what "your mom goes to college" really means.) I did like the story, but the sexy notoriety attributed to it in recent years is undeserved. And that goes double for Tim Burton.