The Cheshire Cat boasts of his evaporating skills in Tim Burton's 3-D 'Alice in Wonderland,' which has its own way of evaporating before your polarized eyes. Every scene brings something new and remarkable -- if not quite wonderful -- to look at, yet every scene sweeps away specific recollections of the previous one. Looked at through one lens, that's a tribute to the immediacy of the images, as well as the wizardly integration of live and computer-generated action. Looked at through another, though, it's a signal that Mr. Burton and his colleagues, like so many filmmakers before them, were flummoxed by the Lewis Carroll conundrum -- not the one about why a raven is like a writing desk, but why that peerless author's enchanting prose should be so resistant to dramatization.

To be fair about Disney's latest attempt to chronicle Alice's trips down the rabbit hole and through the looking glass -- the studio's 1951 animated version still has its passionate partisans and detractors -- drama isn't what the target audience will be coming for. Both Mr. Burton and Disney are global brands -- better-known brands than Lewis Carroll these days -- and the merchandise they've manufactured fulfills two sets of expectations. It's more gothic than Victorian and slightly tinctured with danger, but fully equipped with the sort of exuberant action that sits well in movie theaters and better still in the great theme-park hereafter.

The heroine is played with sweet verve by the Australian actress Mia Wasikowska. This Alice, at the ripe young age of 19, is returning to the magical world of her childhood, so she knows it's all a dream. Still, Linda Woolverton's screenplay makes it clear that she's much less sophisticated than she thinks. Dream or not, Alice is caught up in a power struggle that's raging between the forces of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway), and the poor girl's most reliable guide is the Mad Hatter, who is played by Johnny Depp.

As you might expect -- as his fans surely expect -- Mr. Depp's mincing, flouncing Mad Hatter bears more than a passing resemblance to Jack Sparrow, though Hatter's faint lisp and gap-toothed grin also suggest Laurence Olivier's Archie Rice in 'The Entertainer,' or a young Boris Karloff doing Humphrey Bogart. He's very funny in mildly funny surroundings that are peopled -- creatured -- by such bizarre creations as the doughnut-necked, beetle-browed and shaved-headed Tweedledum and Tweedledee. (I did like the Blue Caterpillar, intimately voiced by Alan Rickman.) But there's nothing mild about Ms. Bonham Carter's Red Queen. She's quick and fierce, with Cupid's-bow lips, a Bette Davis forehead and a huge cranium atop a tiny body. She gets a big laugh every time she howls 'Off with her head!' and she stops the show every time she's on screen.

How she does it says a lot about the actor's craft, and helps to clarify what the movie is missing. Ms. Bonham Carter's star turn in a secondary role is exquisite for its precision and economy. In writing about her performance as the pie maker Mrs. Lovett in Mr. Burton's 'Sweeney Todd,' I admired her song-and-dance-woman's sense of timing, and that's vividly in evidence once again. When the Red Queen says 'I need a pig here,' it's a regal request for a footrest issued casually; she's clearly accustomed to comforting her feet with warm pork bellies. Mr. Depp can be a phenomenal performer too, but not this time. Like the production as a whole, his Mad Hatter is an agreeably whimsical yet unsurprising assemblage, while Ms. Bonham Carter's absolute monarch is a force of unnature and a triumphant illogician.

The most surprising thing about 'Alice in Wonderland' is its general lack of surprise. Was Mr. Burton so distracted by the demands of the complex effects that he had to settle for conventionality? It's not an unreasonable assumption; distraction has become endemic to such productions, which need the services of a field marshal rather than a director.

Whatever the cause or causes, the results are showy but patchy, and initially pokey. A leisurely preface shows Alice not only as a child, dreaming her Wonderland dreams, but as a bride-to-be faced with the prospect of imprisonment in a ghastly marriage. (If that section's bleached, almost colorless look was meant to be a comment on the bloodless society of Alice's upbringing, it was an unattractive and uninviting idea.) As the White Queen, Ms. Hathaway has little to do but look pretty, which she does, and vaguely abstracted, like a woman wandering around a beauty parlor while she waits for her nails to dry. A succession of chases and fanciful combats, more akin to Dungeons & Dragons than to Carroll, leads to a peculiarly truncated climax. The 3-D effects are enjoyable, but the added depth can't make up for deficits in the concept or the plot.

At bottom the concept is earnest bordering on commonplace, a coming-of-age story in which Alice takes therapeutic refuge in her fantasies and emerges from them a stronger person. As for the plot, or lack of it, the filmmakers can be blamed only up to a point. They haven't solved the Lewis Carroll conundrum, haven't cracked the structural code, because Carroll's discursive masterworks don't have much structure and can be dramatized only up to a point, even though their imagery is endlessly tantalizing. The unseizable essence of the two books isn't pictures at all, the Tenniel illustrations notwithstanding. It's the scintillating interplay of language and logic, satiric wit and sublime silliness. For those who have tried to capture the books on screen, and for those who will try in the future, it's a case of read 'em and weep.