Ever since we read the lengthy piece in last Sunday’s New York Times on the upcoming movie Alice in Wonderland, we’ve grown impatient at how slowly the days go by.

Directed by Tim Burton, Alice in Wonderland is a 3D extravaganza, albeit not one on the Avatar scale.

Apparently, the movie was made using 2D cameras and later converted into 3D during post-production.

But this version is not your grandfather’s Alice in Wonderland.

Here’s an excerpt from the NYT piece on the movie:

INSTEAD of Wonderland, it’s Underland. Instead of Alice as a bored but clever child, we get Alice as a 19-year-old rebel and warrior, dispatching the monstrous Jabberwocky with a magic sword. Disney’s second rendering of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy, in other words, is a world apart from both its 1951 cartoon version and the original Victorian-era text.

Directed by Tim Burton, “Alice in Wonderland,” a 3-D blend of live action and animation that opens Friday, is meant as a contemporary, subversive take on a cherished story. With the 20-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, who had a breakout role in the first season of HBO’s “In Treatment,” as Alice, it begins with an unwanted marriage proposal before veering off into Underland, where Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen await.

….Rated PG, this second Disney version of “Alice in Wonderland” has some dark and ominous undertones, both in its look and its story line, that were absent in the cartoon version. Even before Alice becomes a combatant in a Manichean struggle between good and evil, dressed in armor and drinking her vanquished foe’s blood to return to her natural state, she walks across a moat filled with heads to infiltrate the Red Queen’s castle.

Johhny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and the beautiful Mia Wasikowska.

Who can resist the siren call of this magical combination.

We got so excited that we headed to our local library and picked up a copy of Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland (the Weekly Reader Classics edition includes Through the Looking Glass as well).

Alas, what a let down the book turns out to be.

We’ve read nearly two-third of Alice in Wonderland so far and are having a mighty hard time figuring why in the heck this book is so famous.

A little girl follows a rabbit into a rabbit hole, drinks some concoction in a bottle and soon grows tall, grows short, grows tall, grows short and meets a bunch of animals in weird getup ad infinitum.

Say what you will, ’tis not our kinda adventure. 🙁

Perhaps, the book is best appreciated through a child’s mind and fear of the unknown.

To the jaded, been-there-seen-it-all adult mind, Alice in Wonderland the book seems like much ado about nothing.

Thank heavens, the movie promises to be a subversive take on the old story!

By the way, we loved Tim Burton’s last movie Sweeney Todd – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street