Walt Disney's Alice in Wonderland

[a:Jon Scieszka 27318 Jon Scieszka http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1201028327p2/27318.jpg] certainly writes fractured fairy tales very well, but his talent unfortunately does not translate well into this retelling of [a:Lewis Carroll 8164 Lewis Carroll http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1192735053p2/8164.jpg]'s Alice in Wonderland. Perhaps I'm an Alice snob, but I cannot stand to see such a brilliant piece of writing (that adults appreciate the book as much, or perhaps more than, children is a testament to our innate capability to remember what fun it was to be young and full of wonder and curiosity and giggles) dumbed down for today's youth. The text is oversimplified and missing nearly all of the cleverness of the original (Scieszka kept “Curiouser and curiouser,” thank the world), and all would have been lost but for the accompanying artwork by Mary Blair, the designer of the storyboards for the Disney film. Blair's paintings uncannily capture the whimsical world of the book; Disney's film transformed her gestures and intentions into a dreamworld: that's my kind of “translation.”