BURTON has done his best work with contemporary stories, so it's curious if not curiouser that he's turned his sights on another 19th century tale. Perhaps after slitting all those throats in his adaptation of "Sweeney Todd," he thought he would chop off a few heads. Whatever his inspiration, he has tackled this new story with his customary mix of torpor and frenzy. After a short glance back at Alice's childhood and an equally brief look at her present, he sends the 19-year-old on her way, first down the hole and then into a dreamscape where she meets a grinning cat and a lugubrious caterpillar, among other fantastical creatures.

Dark and sometimes grim, this isn't your greatgrandmother's Alice or that of Uncle Walt, who was disappointed with the 1951 Disney version of "Alice in Wonderland." "Alice has no character," said a writer who worked on that project. "She merely plays straight man to a cast of screwball comics." Of course the character of Carroll's original Alice is evident in each outrageous creation she dreams up in "Wonderland" and in the sequel, "Through the Looking-Glass," which means that she's a straight man to her own imagination. (She is Wonderland.) Here she mostly serves as a foil for the top biller Johnny Depp, who plays the Mad Hatter, and Burton's bright and leaden whimsies.

First thought up by Carroll in a rowboat in which one of the passengers was the 10-year-old Alice Liddell, the object of his much-debated love, "Wonderland" (1865) is, among many other things, a testament to glorious nonsense as well as an inspiration for dark thoughts (about Carroll's feelings for Liddell) and for lysergic works from the likes of David Lynch. It's a total (head) trip, one that starts and stops and doesn't fit easily into the mainstream narrative mold, which could explain why the screenwriter Linda Woolverton, borrowing both from "Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass,"has given Alice a back story, a dash of psychology and a battle royal if, alas, not a pool of her own tears in which to swim.

Since narrative momentum isn't Burton's strength, "Alice in Wonderland" probably seemed a good fit for him, and there are moments when his transparent delight in the material lifts the movie and even carries it forward. His Wonderland (here, Underland) isn't inviting or attractive. The colours are often bilious, though the palette also turns gunmetal gray, bringing to mind "Sweeney Todd." There's a suggestively nightmarish aspect to Alice's journey, as when she steps on some severed heads in the Red Queen's moat as if they were stones. The queen herself is a horror: Bette Davis as Elizabeth I and reconfigured as a bobble-head doll. Bonham Carter makes you hear the petulant child in her barbarism and the wounded woman too. She rocks the house and the movie. And she does, even though the character is a harridan cliché who, smitten with her knave and clutching her power, rules with a boom.

She eventually dukes it out with her rival and sister, the White Queen, who enlists Alice's help. There's more, including computer-generated flowers, assorted 3-D projectiles and the usual British actors earning their pay, like the "Harry Potter" alumni Timothy Spall, Alan Rickman and Imelda Staunton. Burton lavishes his attention on the little things in "Wonderland" perhaps because nothing else claims his attention.