Is this going to be a treat or what? Take English literature’s most surreal author and apply cinema’s most surreal director. Then add two of the spookiest actors in Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter for good measure. Forget cute. Forget fluffy. Carroll was never like that in the first place and the director of Nightmare before Christmas and Sweeney Todd is hardly likely to fail him. Just take a look at the concept art and you’ll get the picture. Only Burton could make roses look stuck-up and smug like that. Only he could turn a masterpiece of Victorian gardening into a threatening morass of riotous vegetation. But I digress…

Written by Linda Woolverton (Beauty and the Beast and Lion King, among others), the script opens with a 17 year old Alice (played by 19 year old Australian actress, Mia Wasikowska) attending a swanky party on Victorian estate. Faced with hundreds of snooty upper-class suitors, she runs away and finds herself following a talking white rabbit (voiced by Michael Sheen) down a hole and into the Wonderland she last visited 10 years earlier.

The story thereafter sounds like it will be a mixture of both Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Alice follows the Rabbit and her size keeps changing as in Wonderland. But she meets with the major characters from Looking Glass, including Tweedledum and Tweedledee (Matt Lucas), the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the Red and White Queens (Bonham-Carter and Anne Hathaway). The Mad Hatter (Depp) of course appears in both stories anyway.

The filming, which took 40 days, was completed in December and since then Burton has been merging the live action with CGI and motion-capture creatures and turning it all into 3-D. The completed film is due to premiere on 5th March 2010. Can you wait until then? I’m not sure I can.