Daniel Gordon - Alice in Wonderland

The strongest concept or message that one will find in Tim Burton’s film “Alice in Wonderland,” based on Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass is the idea of knowing yourself and the value of being confident in the person that you are. At the start of the film, Alice is very unconfident. She doesn’t stand up for herself; she merely accepts what people tell her she is and how people tell her she ought to behave. She is, however, very curious about the world outside the one she has been raised in, which is how she ends up following the white rabbit in the first place.
As she travels through Wonderland, or Underland as the characters there inform her is the correct name, the characters and places Alice encounters become metaphors for the struggles of her life. Alice following the rabbit resembles more than the drug trip it is so often accused of representing. As she follows the rabbit instead of responding in the expected affirmative to Hamish’s proposal of marriage, she is, for the first time in a long time, following her own will rather than what is required or expected of her. Characters in Underland try to tell her who she is or is not, and what she can or cannot, must or must not do, and she refuses to satisfy them. Though she eventually does do the things that she must, she does them for her own reasons, not others’ and she does disobey many commands/requests. She feels that she can do this because she is in a dream, but as the “dream” progresses, she begins to see it as more real, and begins to realize that she can assert herself in life. When she emerges from the rabbit hole she tells Hamish that she won’t marry him, tells everyone that she will not conform to their expectations and takes her father’s place as Mr. Ascot’s business partner.