A director, through the looking glass

Brooks Barnes
NYT Syndicate
It was inevitable that Walt Disney Studios would make a sequel to Alice in Wonderland. That 2010 movie, directed by Tim Burton, took in more than $1 billion at the global box office, sending producers across Hollywood scurrying like White Rabbits ” we're late, we're late ” to make live-action storybook movies. Another bite of the Alice mushroom was a no-brainer.
But Disney's return to Lewis Carroll's absurdist fantasyland did have one element that was quite curious: James Bobin.
When he was hired to direct the $170 million Alice Through the Looking Glass, which arrives on May 27, Bobin had made only two modestly budgeted Muppets movies. In fact, Bobin, who is British, was perhaps still best known for television, as a creator of HBO's eccentric 'Flight of the Conchords' and a writer-director for 'Da Ali G Show', where he helped Sacha Baron Cohen create a roster of R-rated characters.
This was Disney's new ace?
The reasoning becomes clearer if you meet Bobin, as I did. Consider, for instance, how he fielded ” in mile-a-minute, foam-in-mouth-corner fashion ” an easy initial question about what appealed to him about the Alice menagerie:
"I thought it would be interesting to take the utterly beautiful world that Tim created in the first movie and push that a bit, applying more absurdity and surrealism and that Victorian sense of fantasy, and adding some, I guess, comedy into it, because that's largely where I have worked ” whilst at the same time serving the central story, which is an emotional one: comedy and emotion, very important." He adjusted his oversize black sunglasses and continued:"Lewis Carroll, you see, wasn't really interested in telling an exciting story. Well, he wasn't interested in things like cause and effect or a linear narrative. It's surreal, it's absurd, it's wordplay, it's satirical, it's analysing itself, it's funny, it's an enormous challenge."
With that, he threw his head back and let loose a burst of laughter that was both jolly and slightly unhinged."Huh-ha-huh-ha-huh!"
I stared at him."You're bonkers, aren't you?" I said, using a line from the film.
"All the best ones are," he replied, not missing a beat.
The affable Bobin, who hit a home run with The Muppets but struck out with Muppets Most Wanted, is the latest lesser-known director to benefit from Hollywood's franchise obsession. As studios seek to keep their film series going ad infinitum, the most valuable directors are often ones who have exhibited a strong sensibility and sense of ambition but who still lack a body of big-screen work and are thus considered more artistically governable. Sometimes it turns out poorly, as when 20th Century Fox gave Fantastic Four to the inexperienced Josh Trank, who melted under the pressure. More often, the new guy ” and it's always a guy ” brings some fresh twists but doesn't leave a tangle. The franchise continues on.
Disney's marketing needs also benefited Bobin, who will next move to Sony Pictures, where he will mash together the Men in Black and 21 Jump Street properties. To sell tickets for an Alice in Wonderland sequel, Disney wanted to advertise the movie as"from" the producer Tim Burton. (Burton never intended to direct the sequel.) So the studio needed a filmmaker who had not yet achieved name-above-the-title status.
"These big, effects-driven films are an entirely different form of collaboration," said the longtime producer Suzanne Todd, whose credits include the Alice movies, the Austin Powers series and little gems like Christopher Nolan's Memento."James had to be very good at listening and filtering. It's very, very bad when young directors shut out the team of old people assembled around them who know more than they do. At the same time, movies never turn out well when directors try to do what everyone else wants."
Bobin, 43, was certainly no pushover. He even pressed Linda Woolverton, who wrote the script, to add a major character named Time, a half-human, half-clock who controls how eternity unfurls and also gives chase to Alice.
"There was just a first draft of a screenplay when I came in," Bobin said."Linda had a nice time-travel movie about Alice going back to save the Hatter's family. I said: 'Hang on a minute. What about making Time a person? And maybe Time has a thing, a sparkly object, that Time uses to travel through time. And maybe, by stealing this thing, Alice breaks the continuum of time, thereby inadvertently forcing Time to pursue her.' Right there, you've got great narrative drive. I did all that."
Bobin turned to a buddy, Cohen, to play the role."There's nothing funnier to me than Sacha playing a competent idiot," Bobin said, adding that Cohen was"heavily involved" with creating the character.
Sole screenplay credit ultimately went to Woolverton, who is something of a Disney legend, having written Beauty and the Beast and Maleficent, among others."James did spark the idea of Time, but he didn't just hand me something," Woolverton said."We developed the character together."
Like its predecessor, Alice Through the Looking Glass has strong feminist currents. All the stars are back, including Mia Wasikowska as Alice Kingsleigh, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Anne Hathaway as the White Queen. Also returning to support Bobin were the visual effects whiz Ken Ralston, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work on the first Alice, and the costume designer Colleen Atwood, who won an Oscar for that film.
But the sequel is quite different. The story, mostly created from whole cloth,"explores the 'why' of this world," Woolverton said."Why does the Red Queen, for example, have such a big head?" (The explanation involves a childhood fall, which Woolverton said reflected a fall of her own as a girl."I slipped on some pickle juice and hit my head.")
This time around, the story also focuses more on Depp's character, who is more sad than mad. His orange hair is combed, and he wears a suit. ("What's illness in a mad person?" Bobin said."Is it being sane?") Summoned by the White Queen to snap the Hatter out of his funk, Alice uses Time's spinning globe ” called the Chronosphere ” to race through the computer-generated Oceans of Time, encountering many wacky creatures.
Time, for instance, has robot helpers called Seconds, who can stack themselves Minions-style into larger entities called Minutes. Humpty Dumpty rolls through. The arch Blue Caterpillar (Alan Rickman, in his last significant role) is now a Blue Butterfly. The Mad Hatter's father, Zanik Hightopp (Rhys Ifans), makes an appearance.
"The movie needed to be sufficiently Carrollian in its difficulty," Bobin said."One of the successes of the movie as far as I'm concerned is that my 8-year-old daughter understands it."