TheLittleSongbird
Now I know Burbank Films Australia are capable of making a good animation. I loved their Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan, but I wasn't sure what to make of their Alice in Wonderland. Granted it's better than the versions of The Three Musketeers, The Old Curiosity Shop and Prisoner of Zenda, but something was lacking here. I did like the theme song, it does repeat itself but it is a pleasant and catchy tune. The characters are more colourful and engaging than the Jetlag version especially Mad Hatter and Queen of Hearts, Alice herself is much less bland and while odd(purposefully) the Cheshire Cat is fun also. The animation is not too bad, while the character designs are on the scratchy side the backgrounds are quite colourful. The rest of the music aside from the song though is rather screechy and over-bearing, while the recording of the voices is I agree rather muted, which probably accounts for why some of the vocal work seemed uninterested. The writing doesn't quite give an over-simplified feeling like the Jetlag version did, but still feels as though it is lacking in thoughtfulness and wit. The story is more faithful in spirit to Jetlag's and while the dream-like feel is there, the oddball nature and the nuances of the story(which I have always considered one of the all-time greats) aren't quite. All in all, not bad as such but I am not sure whether I kind of like it or dislike it. 5/10 Bethany Cox
Dan Cooper
This version offers a marginal/vague coherence to the story as we all know it. But as the film rolls, this vagueness begins to be increasingly troublesome when the other obvious deficits of the film begin to weigh in.The soundtrack is poorly executed, reminding me of listening to a second rate TV station late at night, when the commercials are horrendously too loud in relation to the program. In this case, the musical score is loud, and the character voice track is muted, but the similarity is obvious to even a casual listener. And it is every bit as annoying, especially since you are viewing a package that is supposedly offered by a single entity, without advertisers inserting later leverage with after-the-fact dollars.The animation is okay but not exceptional in any way. And it is a far cry from that in the original Disney classic. And the biggest problem is that the animation is the strong point for this version. The rest of it all trails off rather miserably after that.The story is pretty badly corrupted, and the nuances of the original are largely lost in this very weak imitation. If you have seen the Disney original (and who hasn't?) then you will likely be sorely disappointed with this rendition. But there may be those who can dispute this. Who can say? If you have not seen the Disney feature, then the original story is so strong (even corrupted to this degree) that you might see this version as exceptional.
tedg
Spoilers herein.The Alice stories are among the most important in all literature, period. Not because they are charming, because they aren't really, not in that patronizing Winnie the Pooh sense. But because they are deliberately deep in ways mystical, mathematical and linguistic.The hooks are in the details. If you scour them off, you have incoherence mixed with wacky racers, which is what you have here. This production is apparently for Australian TeeVee and video, and has very poor production values. But that wouldn't have mattered if they hadn't trod on the material. To their credit, they stick closer to the events of the first book, and and use more of the language than most, but with clearly little understanding of what was leveragable.Alas, poor Alice.