Big, bold imaginative fantasies in 3D are all the rage, and who better than Tim Burton to have a go at bringing Lewis Carroll's children's masterpiece to the big screen?

Except that isn't what he's done.

Instead, he's hired Linda Woolverton (responsible for two of the best cartoons of recent years, Beauty And The Beast and The Lion King) to write a sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, incorporating some of the same characters.

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Fey English accent: Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter

It's a bold idea, and Burton shows all his usual visual panache in bringing it to fruition. I only wish Woolverton had been as imaginative as her director.

Instead, she's followed Terry Gilliam's example (he had the same idea in 1977) in taking Carroll's nonsense poem Jabberwocky and dramatising that, this time with a teenage Alice, rather than a muddy Michael Palin, as the protagonist.

The story becomes a very different beast from the ones Lewis Carroll created. It's a tale of feminist empowerment, with an entrepreneurial, pro-capitalist ending that is unlikely to endear it to readers of the Guardian.

Newcomer Mia Wasikowska plays Alice in Tim Burton's new film

Alice (played with an impeccable English accent by pretty Australian newcomer Mia Wasikowska) is a young woman about to be married off to an upper-class twit. The proposal takes place in an ornate gazebo before a crowd of onlookers, so that Alice feels pressurised to accept.

However, she is distracted by - inevitably - a white rabbit, voiced by Michael Sheen, that only she can see. She falls down a rabbit hole and returns to the Wonderland of her childhood dreams.

Here, she discovers that the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter, with a spectacularly bulbous head) is terrorising her subjects with the help of a frumious bandersnatch, a jub-jub bird and - the ultimate deterrent - a jabberwock, or jabberwocky (voiced by Christopher Lee).

The white rabbit, voiced by Michael Sheen

Alice In Wonderland's wonderfully imagined world

Alice is encouraged to act as the champion of the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) by various childhood acquaintances, many of whom are doubtful whether she can possibly be the 'real' Alice.

It doesn't help that the person most confident she IS the real Alice is the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp). Other refugees from the original books are the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman), Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), Tweedledum and Tweedledee (both played by Matt Lucas). Some of the old characters have changed beyond recognition.

Off with their heads: Tim Burton's wife Helena Bonham Carter plays the Red Queen

Off with the fairies: Anne Hathaway plays the White Queen

Carroll's sleepy dormouse has turned into a female version of Reepicheep from C.S. Lewis's Narnia, a pugnacious warrior voiced, bizarrely, by Barbara Windsor. Anne Hathaway's White Queen seems to be either away with the fairies, or under the influence of some substance or other.

The film is stolen by Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen and she's often very funny, but I wish her performance was not quite so obviously influenced by Miranda Richardson's Elizabeth I in Blackadder.

I was most disappointed by Johnny Depp, who keeps switching accents between fey English and Mel Gibson-style Scottish as the Mad Hatter, possibly in an attempt to suggest schizophrenia. I kept wishing he would stick to one and start building a performance.

Double-trouble: Matt Lucas plays the twin grotesques of Tweedledum and Tweedledee

The Cheshire cat, which can appear and disappear at will, is voiced by Stephen Fry

The look of the film is terrific, however, and Colleen Atwood's costumes are a delight. Atwood has won two Oscars already, for Chicago and Memoirs Of A Geisha. These are her finest yet.

Is Alice in Wonderland worth seeing? Yes, because it's a feast for the eyes. But the story needed to be more imaginative and involving for this to become a massive hit, and it's not obvious whether it's aimed at children or adults.

Either way, it's far from brillig.

Special effects: £158million was spent making the new Alice In Wonderland film