This one doesn't try to charm you, it just drops you into a Wonderland that's already rotting and waits to see if you flinch. The hook is Alice herself: summoned by the White Rabbit to push back the spreading Darkness, and immediately calling nonsense on it, because she's read the book and she knows a dream when she's in one. That refusal to play along is the whole engine, and it's why the scores split down the middle between people calling it a 1 and people calling it a 9. The backdrops are the real performance here, haunting and painterly in a way the character animation flatly cannot match, and you will notice the budget in every stiff movement. Then grown-up Alice watches her dream start happening for real, and the calm you sat through turns into something colder. Come for the paintings, stay for the ending that doesn't let you off.

The White Rabbit calls on Alice to rescue Wonderland from a Darkness that is steadily spreading. Alice is not fooled: she knows Alice in Wonderland is only a story, so she concludes that what she is experiencing must be a dream. She turns out to be right. At the end, though, an Alice who has since grown up watches as the events of that dream start to happen in reality. The film is a fantasy adventure that plays with the gap between dreaming and waking.