‘Alice Through the Looking Glass’ Is a Surreal and Whimsical Ride Through Time

Anne Hathaway described it perfectly when she called it “a world of limitless imagination.”

She was speaking, of course, about her latest film “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” Disney’s sequel to its highly popular ‘10 “Alice in Wonderland,” based on Lewis Carroll’s novels “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.”

“Alice Through the Looking Glass” picks up the story three years later when a wiser Alice (Mia Wasikowska) finds a magical looking glass that takes her from sailing the ocean blue back to the nonsensical world of Underland where she finds things are in disarray. Alice discovers that her friend the Hatter (Johnny Depp) is, for reasons he won’t disclose to her, even madder and only Alice can save him from the darkness that befalls him by travelling back in time. She looks to the part-human/part-clock character of Time (Sacha Baron Cohen) for guidance on time travel only to be warned that no one wins the race against time. Still, using the highly coveted Chronosphere, a time travelling device, Alice succeeds in going back to the past.

It is there that Alice has a front row seat to the mistakes and successes that all her friends have experienced over the course of their lives. She learns not only how those experiences got them to where they are today but also what she can do to help Hatter solve his problems (and perhaps some of her own). Alice must hurry and complete her mission, however, because time with the Chronosphere is limited.

The classic characters from “Alice in Wonderland” return in this sequel and includes White Queen (Hathaway), Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter), Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry) and Absolem (aka the Blue Caterpillar and the voice of the late Alan Rickman). New characters include Time (Cohen) and the Mad Hatter’s dad Zanik Hightopp (Rhys Ifans).

Notably, Tim Burton, who directed “Alice in Wonderland,” wasn’t in the director’s chair this time around. Rather, it was James Bobin who was hired by Disney to direct and takes credit for bringing more farce and folly to the sequel.

“I thought it would be interesting to take the utterly beautiful world that Tim created in the first movie and push that a bit,” Bobin said in an interview, “applying more absurdity and surrealism and that Victorian sense of fantasy, and adding some, I guess, comedy into it . . . .”

That, he did.

Alice Through the Looking Glass” comes to theaters May 27.