Rights statement: This article has been accepted for publication in Adaptation. Published by Oxford University Press.
Submitted manuscript, 119 KB, PDF document
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Book/Film/Article review › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Book/Film/Article review › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Adaptation as compendium
T2 - Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
AU - Elliott, Kamilla
N1 - This article has been accepted for publication in Adaptation. Published by Oxford University Press.
PY - 2010/9
Y1 - 2010/9
N2 - Most reviewers decree Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland ‘disappointinger and disappointinger’, both as a literary adaptation and as a film, largely because the film adapts so many things besides Carroll's books, rendering it digressive and derivative. The script, which expresses anxieties about being ‘the wrong Alice’, figures the adaptation/sequel as a compendium (a brief treatment of a subject). Compendium's second sense, inventory, points more centrally to the film as pastiche. Since literary film adaptations are increasingly constructed as deliberate pastiches of other cultural productions, I argue that it is time to ask new questions of these processes rather than view them solely as failing the books and copying rather than creating. The review ends with a discussion of how CGI (computer-generated imagery) and 3D displace Carroll's nonsense as superior sense with fantasy as alternative reality and how the film's colonial ending reflects Disney's own, very real capitalist enterprises in China.
AB - Most reviewers decree Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland ‘disappointinger and disappointinger’, both as a literary adaptation and as a film, largely because the film adapts so many things besides Carroll's books, rendering it digressive and derivative. The script, which expresses anxieties about being ‘the wrong Alice’, figures the adaptation/sequel as a compendium (a brief treatment of a subject). Compendium's second sense, inventory, points more centrally to the film as pastiche. Since literary film adaptations are increasingly constructed as deliberate pastiches of other cultural productions, I argue that it is time to ask new questions of these processes rather than view them solely as failing the books and copying rather than creating. The review ends with a discussion of how CGI (computer-generated imagery) and 3D displace Carroll's nonsense as superior sense with fantasy as alternative reality and how the film's colonial ending reflects Disney's own, very real capitalist enterprises in China.
U2 - 10.1093/adaptation/apq009
DO - 10.1093/adaptation/apq009
M3 - Book/Film/Article review
VL - 3
SP - 193
EP - 201
JO - Adaptation
JF - Adaptation
SN - 1755-0637
IS - 2
ER -