Alice Through the Looking Glass (1987)

A short-lived animation production company known as Burbank Films Australia produced many full-length features based on public domain works throughout the 1980s.  Like an Alice in Wonderland adaptation was made in 1988, the company first ventured into the works of Carroll in 1987 with Alice Through the Looking Glass.  Unlike their Wonderland cartoon, this was a modern adaptation that only followed the basic structure of the book.

Characters are added and changed, the plot is also jumbled a bit, and most of the dialogue it brand new.  While some scenes keep the Carrollian tone alive, most of the feature feels like an '80s Saturday morning cartoon.  A voice cast that featured both Phyllis Diller and Mr. T helped make clear what kind of show this was supposed to be.  It's hard to tell if this is a reimagining or not with so many changes present.

Original Source Breakdown

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - NOT INCLUDED

Through the Looking-Glass
Chapter I: Looking-Glass House - ALTERED
A modern Alice finds herself stuck at home in a snowstorm while her father leaves to go help deliver a baby.  She travels through the Looking Glass and instantly finds herself in a garden.  Much later in the film, the Jabberwock and the Bandersnatch appear as two of the Red Queen's thuggish henchmen/monsters who try to stop Alice from making it through the Seventh Square

Chapter II: The Garden of Live Flowers - ALTERED
Upon entering the garden, Alice meets a new character, the White Queen's jester Tom Fool.  He helps explain to Alice about Chessland and takes her to the White Queen's castle in the First Square.  After Alice gets permission from the abrasive White Queen and her dullard White King, she becomes a player in the game.

Chapter III: Looking-Glass Insects - ALTERED
Tom Fool escorts Alice through the Second Square where they encounter the Elephant-Bees from the beginning of this chapter.  He leaves her at the Third Square where Alice gets on the train.  Here, she meets the Goat, who is presented as the president of the railway and Alice keeps giving him logical suggestions on how to run his train better.  She also meets the Horse who is based on Seabiscuit and the Gentleman in Paper becomes the literal Newspaper Man with a lot of newspaper puns made at his expense.  The train ride lasts much longer than in the book with various gags and at the end of the line, Alice must take a ferry into the Fourth Square.

Chapter IV: Tweedledum and Tweedledee - ALTERED
Dee and Dum are presented as short, fitness obsessed joggers who live in a junkyard.  If this is supposed to be a reference to something, I couldn't tell.  They don't have a battle, but they mention that they keep in shape by fighting each other.  They escort Alice to the Fifth Square without "The Walrus in the Carpenter" or the Red King encounter occurring.

Chapter V: Wool and Water - REMOVED

Chapter VI: Humpty Dumpty - ALTERED
Humpty Dumpty now owns the Fifth Square rather than the Sixth.  He is presented as a dinosaur egg that has taken so long to hatch that he decided to come alive on the outside.  He doesn't spend much time on the wall and shows Alice around his "Easter Egg Island" with all of his painted giant eggs.  He does not fall of the wall or break at all.

Chapter VII: The Lion and the Unicorn - REMOVED

Chapter VIII: "It's My Own Invention" - ALTERED
The White Knight is now present in the Sixth Square.  He acts like a typical Arthurian knight and basically just takes Alice across the square as they encounter various perils.

Chapter IX: Queen Alice - ALTERED
The Red Queen is presented as an antagonist who sends her monsters out to attack Alice in the Seventh Square.  Alice eventually makes it to her castle in the Eighth Square where she must crown her at the feast.  However, the Red Queen tries to get her Wizard to use his magic to get rid of Alice and her crown.  He eventually succeeds, with all the baddies chasing Alice and Tom Fool back through the chess game all the way to the First Square.  Alice goes back through the Looking Glass.

Chapter XII: Which Dreamed It? - ALTERED
Alice wakes up in her bedroom and tells her father all about her crazy dream.  Or was it a dream?

The Hunting of the Snark - REFERENCED

The Snark from Carroll's epic poem appears as the third baddie in the Red Queen's trio of monsters.  He's presented as a small, nebbish, blue humanoid creature that gets picked on by the Jabberwock and the Bandersnatch for being an inferior monster.

Review:

For a majority of this adaptation, I was just left scratching my head.  Why did they make so many changes to the story?  As I said, the whole story felt like an old cartoon with simpler animation and very obvious plot points.  This felt like with few minor tweaks, this could have been an episode of He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Rainbow Brite and the like.

The simplified structure of having the White Queen being good and the Red Queen being evil with Alice traveling from one to the other does keep with this modern cartoon approach, but it caused the story to lose a lot of its whimsy.  There weren't any stakes for Alice and it wasn't like she had to deal with the logical confusion that the two Queens presented her with in the story.  To make the story more accessible, it became less entertaining.  (There is a progressive scene where Alice tells the White Queen that it's okay for her to wear jeans, as it doesn't make her a boy.  So, there.)

Elements I did like included the expansion of the train scene, as the conversations Alice had with the Goat, Horse, and Newspaper Man felt just like something Lewis Carroll would write.  And since they were going that down the Saturday cartoon route anyway, the trio of the Snark, the Bandersnatch, and the Jabberwock were a pleasant addition to the story.  The Jabberwock is played by Mr. T, which really worked for this aesthetic.  They were funny characters and I could potentially have seen this as being the pilot to a series where they constantly try to foil the plans of Wonderland citizens.

Tom Fool, however, was a very unnecessary addition to the story.  He could do all sorts of magic and impressions, but it just seemed like he was an attempt to make this more of a "boy's" story, turning Alice into this helpless character who just follows him along and dreams about being a queen.  He gets about 50% of the screen time and his presence caused the story of the chess game to take forever to begin, due to all of his singing and shenanigans.

Other alterations to the plot worked very poorly.  Humpty Dumpty being a dinosaur egg just seemed pointless, as he didn't have anything interesting to say.  The White Knight was pretty forgettable and bland.  And the Tweedles were just the worst.  They sing this horrible introduction song that wasn't enjoyable to listen to or funny, and that was basically all they did.  They were such a strong departure from the characters in the book that one wonders why they even bothered including them.

While there are some minor moments of clever interpretations to the plot, the overall feature is a mess.  I see that they were going for a generic adventure cartoon, and it definitely fit that mold, but nearly every scene felt like filler.  I would suggest that if you're curious, that you only watch the Jabberwock scene and skip the rest.

1.5 out of 5 Saturday Mornings