This past Monday night I went to the local Terrace Theater—full of vintage billboards of classic flicks—to see the reimagined, and not so classic, "Alice Through The Looking Glass". I couldn’t tell you what caused me to overcome my disdain for poorly plotted children’s movies with “highly-renowned” special effects, but I can tell you that I was grateful for the change. Entering that theater meant that I had begun a transitional journey to a land where eggs can talk and cats can fly—where virtually anything is possible. As psychedelic as it sounds, I found it to be rather grounding. What seeing this new set of visuals did for me—and every other child in the gallery—explained how to defy the impossible, especially among a dream’s many obstacles.
“Sometimes I think of six impossible things before I eat breakfast,” a daring Alice Kingsley tells the Mad Hatter in Disney’s "Alice In Wonderland" (2010). This attitude never left the—now 19-year-old-adventurer is seen sailing through treacherous seas in the beginning of "Alice Through The Looking Glass." We no longer see a dazed Alice with inquisitive tendencies. Instead, we see a grown up girl fulfilling dreams as she dares to do the impossible. Now a ship captain and world traveler, she heads back toward Wonderland to retouch the roots of her forgotten self-accomplishments. In Wonderland, she finds an ill Hatter and two time-controlling villains attempting to rewrite the past, present and future.
I was a little hesitant when I heard that Sacha Baron Cohen would be in a kid’s movie. It made me wonder whether Disney had lost all of its marbles or if the rest would soon spill out in the next hour and a half. In my opinion, Cohen did an adequate job in portraying “Time.” Unsurprisingly, he was the villain. Time was a pivotal role in the movie’s theme of fulfillment. He began the movie as Alice’s enemy, but then crossed over the line of good and evil to aid Alice in her deemed impossible mission. Cohen’s role not only helped the plot develop, but it helped the viewer evolve in his or her fantasy. It showed the young audience how to rearrange their obstacles into advantages. It showed children that time can, in fact, be on their side.
So now the lights have appeared and the credits roll out like the children leaving and laughing about their favorite part, in their now favorite movie. And I sit in the empty theater simply wondering: what did this movie do for me? My fingers brushed against my chin a mere thirty times before I could finally put my tongue on the words of this movie’s meaning. It was the villain and the sidekick; the equivocating force between my own childhood fantasy and a thing called destiny. It was time.
