by Anna Marie Piconi '29 on October 1, 2026
A&E - Film & TV
There is something rather peculiar about the expectation that we must eventually outgrow fairy tales. At some indeterminate age, we are supposed to abandon talking animals, the enchanted forest, and the possibility of impossible things in favor of a more sensible understanding of the world. Imagination becomes childish, curiosity becomes impractical, and wonder is reduced to something we ought to remember fondly rather than continue to experience. Yet, I would argue that the older we grow, the more necessary these strange little worlds become. After all, what is adulthood if not the gradual discovery that the world makes considerably less sense than we once believed?
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is perhaps the most delightful demonstration of this. Alice tumbles down a rabbit hole into a world where the laws of logic are continually contradicted, language becomes unreliable, and authority is exercised by creatures who possess a view of the world in a seemingly backward way. Yet what makes Wonderland so extraordinary is not merely its nonsense, but the uncomfortable familiarity concealed beneath it.
Alice spends much of the novel attempting to understand who she is in a world that refuses to remain consistent. Having grown and shrunk repeatedly, she asks herself, “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” It is a wonderfully absurd predicament, though hardly one exclusive to childhood. We spend much of our lives attempting to reconcile who we believe ourselves to be with who the world expects us to become. Wonderland merely has the courtesy to make this confusion visible.
Tim Burton’s 2010 adaptation develops this very question. His Alice, now 19 years old, finds herself confronted with the rather unappealing prospect of a life already determined for her. Marriage, social expectations, and the conventions of respectable society await her, none of which she seems particularly enthusiastic about accepting. Her return to Wonderland is consequently more than an escape into fantasy; it becomes an opportunity to recognize a part of herself that the ordinary world has given her little permission to explore.
This is what I find so compelling about Burton’s understanding of wonder. His fantastical worlds are seldom places of uncomplicated happiness. They are filled with skeletons, corpses, misunderstood creatures, and individuals who seem altogether incapable of belonging to the world in which they have been born. Yet there is something remarkably tender about their strangeness. In Corpse Bride, love reveals itself through the painful necessity of letting go. In Frankenweenie, Victor, the little boy, is determined to resurrect his beloved dog, Sparky, and he has to process the human inability to accept death and the unsettling question of whether resurrection is an act of love or just our refusal to let go. Even Jack Skellington, in The Nightmare Before Christmas, produced by Burton and directed by Henry Selick, discovers that an entire world cannot necessarily satisfy the longing he feels within his own.
Their circumstances are fantastical, but the desires beneath them are not. These stories confront grief, loneliness, identity, and our rather desperate attempts to hold on to things that cannot remain unchanged. Their magic does not eliminate suffering. Rather, it gives us an imaginative language through which to understand it.
This tension between wonder and loss becomes apparent in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the Burton-produced sequel directed by James Bobin. Alice’s attempt to recover the Mad Hatter’s family leads her into a confrontation with Time himself. Beneath the colorful absurdity lies a truth: neither imagination nor determination can restore everything we have lost. Growing older means discovering that something cannot be undone, however desperately we might wish otherwise.
And perhaps therein lies the importance of fairy tales. They do not require us to believe that the world is innocent, nor do they promise that everything strange and wonderful will remain untouched by sorrow. Rather, they allow us to recognize that beauty and strangeness, grief and delight, can occupy the very same world.
There is a rather lovely saying, often mistakenly attributed to Carroll, that the secret to finding Wonderland is to surround yourself with people who make your heart smile. Perhaps there is something to be said for this. Wonderland, after all, is not only a place Alice discovers but a world inhabited by those who recognize her peculiarities without demanding that she abandon them. And that is another thing we fail to appreciate about fairy tales as children: the extraordinary comfort of finding someone with whom we can be entirely ourselves. C. S. Lewis understood something of this relationship between childhood and maturity when he wrote to his goddaughter in the dedication to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, “But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” Maybe it is only after growing older, encountering grief, and discovering something of the strange business of being human that we begin to understand what their stories have been telling us all along. Wonder, it seems, is not necessarily found in the impossible, but occasionally in the rather ordinary miracle of being understood. Growing up, to me, has never meant leaving Wonderland behind, but discovering that it was never quite so far as we imagined.