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It's not breaking news that director Tim Burton has a vision. With films like Edward Scissorhands (1990), Beetle Juice (1988), Sleepy Hollow (1999), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), he has built an empire based on visually stunning images and weirder-than-life characters.
In his newest film, Alice in Wonderland (2010), Burton has once again called upon his genius. He signed on to do the 3-D film in November of 2007 for Walt Disney Pictures. At that time, he explained that the goal "is to try and make it an engaging movie where you get some of the psychology and kind of bring a freshness, but also keep the classic nature of Alice."
Burton has never really felt an emotional connection to Alice in the past, saying that the original story was about a girl who was wandering around from character to character without experiencing an emotional connection, herself. It's for that reason that he wanted to give the story "some framework of emotional grounding, and to try and make Alice feel more like a story as opposed to a series of events."
To capture the right visual effects, Burton chose to use a combination of live action and animation. He also opted to use a green screen, a first for the director. Filming with the green screen, which comprised 90% of the total filming, took only 40 days, but it's not always easy being green. Just ask the actors and crew. Several of them became sick from constantly being surrounded by the color. Burton wore rose colored glasses to avoid the nausea.
Michael Rechtshaffen of the Hollywood Reporter describes Alice in Wonderland (2010) like this: "Burton has delivered a subversively witty, brilliantly cast, whimsically appointed dazzler that also manages to hit all of the emotionally satisfying marks. Ultimately, it's the visual landscape that makes Alice's new adventure so wondrous, as technology has finally been able to catch up with Burton's endlessly fertile imagination."
Those rose colored glasses do the trick every time.
