As they did in Alice in Wonderland, Carter’s head is digitally adjusted to be three times its size in Through the Looking Glass. However, they didn’t adjust the shots for it during production, meaning her head takes up about two thirds of the frame. It gets pretty rude in shot-reverse shot sequences where the movie flips rapidly from another character, framed at a comfortable distance, to the red queen all up in the camera’s business. Photos courtesy Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios.
Six years ago, Alice in Wonderland unexpectedly took the global box office by storm. Now, we have Alice Through the Looking Glass, which is the exact same movie.
After a bunch of boring stuff happens in the real world, Alice Kingsleigh (Mia Wasikowska) returns to Wonderland after being guided to a magical mirror by Absolem (Alan Rickman), who was mysteriously absent from that point on for some unknown reason. Kingsleigh reunites with all the good guys from the first movie who tell her the very best one, the mad hatter Tarrant Hightopp (Johnny Depp, Louis Ashbourne Serkis as a child) has become very depressed. Hightopp is certain that his family, which was killed by the Red Queen Icerabeth’s (Helena Bonham Carter, Lellah de Meza as a child) Jabberwocky several years ago, is alive, and no one will believe him. After some cajoling, Kingsleigh is sent to take the chronosphere from the personification of Time (Sasha Baron Cohen doing a hackney Arnold Schwarzenegger impression), who moonlights as the Grim Reaper, and use it to go back in time and retrieve the Hightopp family so her imaginary friend won’t die of depression.
Sequels are always tricky and strange, and there are a lot of shortcuts studios take to try and make them successful. This one took the shortcut of being exactly the same as the first movie in every way it could. Same too-perfect makeup. Same vague, half-hearted stab at feminist themes. Same awkward overimportance placed on the hatter because they convinced Depp to play him.
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