Inspired By: Alice Through The Looking Glass

It's again the 10th of the month and time for the "Inspired by" creation! But what is Inspired by? Every month awesome Marsha and I choose a subject to be inspired by. It can be for example an idea (link), a product (link), a person (link) or a book (link). Or anything! Then we make something inspired by that theme or a piece of art and share it with you and each other on the 10th of the month. You can browse the past "Inspired By" posts from here (link). 

If my memory serves me correct, our very first Inspired By post was about a movie, more over a Tim Burton movie. Ever since then we have bumped into him in a number of occasions - sometimes deliberately, sometimes out of coincidence. When the first Alice movie hit the theaters it was a no brainer that it would be an Inspired By theme. You can see me post about the first movie and the creation inspired by that one here (link) and Marsha's take here (link).

So when the second Alice movie was announced and we learned the date it will be in cinemas, we set upon having it as the theme. Here's a link to the movie's IMDB page (link) and you can find info about it also in Wikipedia (link). 

As I'm now adding a bunch of links here, let me share the link to Marsha's post for today (link) about the same inspiration source now in the beginning as well. I wonder what she has come up with!

Warning - don't read the following paragraphs if you don't want to hear the story line of the movie. Please then just jump to the next photo and start reading after that! 

The movie starts at sea, where Alice maneuvers her ship "Wonder" through a tough spot and then reaches London. She's been away quite a while, three years, and much has changed since her departure at the end of the first movie. Hamish Ascot, her ex-fiancé has inherited the company and is now putting Alice to pay for the rejection of marriage. He's after her ship and is using Alice's mother's house as a leverage to get it. All this is revealed in a ball Alice and her mother attend. While stunned and puzzled by the news Alice sees Absolem fluttering in the garden. He leads her back to Wonderland through a mirror.

Something is wrong with the Hatter and the White Queen and the friends think Alice is the only one who can help. Hatter is missing terribly his family, believed to be killed in the past, and Alice is determined to help him. White Queen realizes that there might be a way to change the past and that is by loaning a Chronosphere from Time. Alice then sets out to Time's palace to ask the Chronosphere out for a loan. 

Time's palace is a huge clock and inside it there's a time piece that powers all time in Wonderland. Time explains to Alice that past can't be altered and he can't loan the Chronosphere. Alice is determined to help Hatter and steals the Chronosphere from Time. While running away from the minutes and seconds guarding the magical piece, she also stumbles across the Red Queen now exiled. 

Alice starts to travel through time and accidentally flies to the Red Queen's coronation day. It is revealed to the viewer that on the day of the coronation Red Queen gets really angry with the Hightopps (family of Hatter) because the crown won't fit to her abnormally large head and Hatter finds it rather funny. While the Queen gets a tantrum, almost screaming her catch phrase "off with their heads", her father, the king, deems the crown to pass to her younger sister, White Queen, instead of her. Alice also learns that there has been an accident in the past which has caused the head of the Red Queen to be so big and decides to prevent it from happening, thus saving Hatter's family from being attacked by the Red Queen's pet, the Jabberwocky. 

Alice travels again through time. When the Chronosphere is not in the hands of Time in the big clock, powering all time of the Wonderland, the big clock itself starts to fall apart. Alice fails to prevent the Queen's accident and thus change the past. Time confronts Alice and explains that she can't change the past but she can instead learn from it. Alice runs away through a mirror to the real world, where she wakes up in a mental institute she has been taken. She then manages to escape and return to the Wonderland and to the day of the Jabberwocky's attack. She sees that against to the common belief, Hatter's family wasn't killed during that day but instead taken hostage by the Red Queen. 

Returning to present time in Wonderland, Alice finds Hatter on the brink of death. He's turned into white and colorless. Alice tells him what she has learned and declares that she believes in him. Her voice and belief bring back the Hatter from the brink and he turns colorful again. The company then sets out to rescue Hatter's family from the Red Queen. They travel to the Red Queen's castle and find out that Hatter's family is shrunk and now living in an ant farm the Red Queen keeps. The company is captured and the priced Chronosphere falls to the hands of the Red Queen, who then sets out to change the past. She doesn't hear the warnings and a catastrophe happens - the former Queen sees the present Queen and all time becomes irrelevant. Everything in the Wonderland starts to rust in place in all times - past and present. 

The White Queen, Time and Alice, who have managed to travel to the same spot as the Red Queen, then get the Chronosphere and start they journey swiftly towards the present time and Time's palace. They need to return the Chronosphere to it's original place in order to avoid the destruction of all Wonderland. 

After a sort of chase scene Alice manages to put the Chronosphere to it's place and Wonderland starts to un-freeze and un-rust. Hatter is united with his family, which the White Queen turns normal sized again. The two Queens make a truce and the big clock, powering all time in the Wonderland, is once again running smoothly. Alice then returns to the real world. She's ready to sign over her ship to Hamish to save her mother's house but her mother decides against it. They keep the ship and loose their house but instead of mourning and staying in London both of the Kingsleigh ladies then travel to China where they start a shipping company of their own. 

As you can see from the trailer and the picture above, the movie followed the strong colors of the first movie. The whole movie is visually highly appealing and the colors are juicy and vibrant. I guess the teenage girls sitting beside me in the theater thought either that I was some kind of weirdo or a critic when I scribbled notes in the dark during the movie. In my notes there's notions lie "different worlds have different color schemes", "Alice as captain - uniform" and "roles, growing up". 

While there would have been great topics in the themes of the movie (like can't change the past but can learn from it, the very rigid roles of different sexes during the time period...) I fell in love with the aesthetics and especially the dark, inky blues of the Time's palace. The setting reminded me of a computer game called Myst - I happened to loan it from the library when I was quite young because the cover was so beautiful. As I didn't know that much English at the time (so it must have been before I was 11 years old) I couldn't actually play the game past the first few challenges, but I remember it being very pretty. The Time's palace had that same beauty. It was kind of Gothic meets Persia or Morocco. It was gloomy, but not dark. It had great halls and arches extending towards heavens like Gothic churches but also ornate archways with clover styled shape on top.  

From early on, even when leaving the theater, I knew I wanted to do something clock related. It wasn't neither that hard to think about the color scheme as most of Time's palace is in the shades of blues. There's electric blue shades but also the turquoise of Absolem.

So I knew "clock" and "turquoise/blue" but then started the thinking part. There was some hanging clocks in the movie, clocks with wings, of course the big clock that kept the all time of the Wonderland, but then it hit me that also Time was powered by a clock. It was his heart. I then remembered the clock shaped frame I had been hoarding from a while as I wanted to save it for something special. All the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place.

So here you have my creation - a clock shaped heart clock. The layers inside the clock aren't that visible in the photo, but underneath the metal heart there's for example a cassette and a piece from a computer. There's also some scattered numbers and gears. 

The clock on top of the heart mimics the clock Alice has and which has originally belonged to her father. It's also a homage to the first movie and the White rabbit with the pocket watch. The watch is actually a wooden embellishment to which I attached a plastic pebble on top for the glass part.

I wanted the piece to have some contrast so while the inside is mechanical, there's flowers and undulating shapes on top. The paper shapes mimic a hat, of course inspired by Hatter, but also by the end credits as there was quilling involved in those.

Oh and I have to still say that I was quite pleasantly surprised by Sacha Baron Cohen, who played Time. I feared that he'd be too comical but apart from the very first scene he's in, there wasn't too much hints to his past roles and characters.

Thank you for your visit today! And a special thank you if you managed to read the whole post! Wishing you a lovely Sunday!

Materials: Prima Marketing, Sharpie