Tim Burton to make Alice in Wonderland

My favorite books ever are Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.* Actually, I don't remember whether I liked them when I was a kid--I think, vaguely, I thought they were just too weird. But maybe that's just apocryphal memory-making. In high school, a friend of mine reintroduced me to them, and to The Annotated Alice, which explains all the weird stuff in the books, from defining most of the words in "Jabberwocky" to giving the original poems that were being parodied.

...and now, to know that Tim Burton's going to direct a version? Ah, such sweet sorrow, to know that Gene Wilder is dead, and can no longer sing "Soup of the Evening, Beautiful Soup." I love Tim Burton's work, but man, I don't know if he can top the Gene Wilder version. (Well, I say Gene
Wilder, but the director is Nick Willing, who also did the awesome Photographing Fairies. Ooh, this is the same guy that's doing the new Tin Man series, which I have been wanting to check out. Internets good.)


*So why do I like them so much? What seems like order is actually nonsense; what seems like nonsense is actually order. I grew up in the same kind of era that Alice did--the same kinds of pressures for extreme conformity, prudery, and the idea that just because someone had been doing something for years that it made any kind of sense whatsoever! Once I understood the books were made to mock the ordinary way of things, Alice became my hero: "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" A fair iconoclast :)