James Bobin on ‘Alice Through the Looking Glass,’ social commentary, favorite character
Director James Bobin will be going from incredible success with The Muppets to take over for Tim Burton, helming Alice Through the Looking Glass. Bobin talked with Collider and began with recounting how he ended up with the project.
“I was at Disney. I was working for Disney, and I was finishing Muppets Most Wanted, and I was talking about other things that they were thinking about getting involved with. They mentioned Alice and I said, ‘I know Alice very well,’ because in England it’s a book that your grandparents have at their house, your parents have at their house, and I have at my house. It’s a thing that everyone knows. You grew up with it. I’ve always loved Alice and I’ve always loved Lewis Carroll. I love his kind of tone and his intelligence. So, it was the chance to work on a sequel to Tim’s movie, which I could then bring some of my sensibility to in terms of my comedic background.”
Bobin then took to the experiment of explaining the social commentary of the Alice In Wonderland sequel.
“One of the first things I looked up with Alice was how it was made. I went to the University at Oxford so I knew the river where Carroll told the story to Alice Liddell, the girl who was the real Alice. I was interested in Alice Liddell and where she came from and her life,” he told Collider.
“She was born in the 1850’s. Then, I thought, wait a minute, because that is the same decade that someone like Emmeline Pankhurst was born, who then later on, of course, became the founder of the Suffragette Movement in England for women’s suffrage. So, I thought she really does represent a new generation of women who are not prepared to accept the status quo and think and strongly believe they should be equal to men. This is the first time in history that this has happened. I loved the idea that Lewis Carroll, even in those days, saw this, that there was going to be a change in the world, and that women were no longer going to be like the women he knew or his mother’s generation.”
Bobin talks about following Burton, adapting the novel, using elements of “…design, of location, of ideas, of grammar, of just the sense of the place, rather than actual narrative drive” and picking a character “for himself.”
“I love Thackery because he’s crazy, and so, he’s a very amusing character. And again, he’s got very nice fur. He’s very soft.”
Check out the full interview at Collider
Mia Wasikowska is back as Alice with Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter. The movie reunites the cast and unforgettable characters from the first film while also introducing exciting new characters played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Rhys Ifans.
