American McGee, best known for his twisted takes on Wonderland in the games Alice and Alice: Madness Returns, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to secure the film rights necessary to produce a series of animated Alice films and eventually a full-length, theatrical feature film.
The animated films, which McGee envisions (along with the feature film) as the third chapter of his Alice trilogy, will focus on Alice’s ability to enter “Otherlands”, the minds of famous contemporaries of Alice like Vincent Van Gogh, Jules Verne, and Charles Darwin. In each of the animated shorts, Alice will enter the mind of one of these luminaries and explore the unique landscape of their imagination and subconscious.
The Kickstarter page alludes to “world famous” writers and directors that have expressed interest in the project. McGee envisions each short having a unique shape and narrative arc established by the talent creating it, and invites comparisons to the Animatrix, the collection of animated shorts that explored peripheral areas of The Matrix fiction from interesting new angles.
The project page also references an overarching plot that involves Alice battling against a conspiracy in Victorian London to trap the minds of the city’s inhabitants in some sort of nightmarish prison. Never one to shy away from social commentary, McGee claims that narrative is analogous to the “soul-crushing” transition to an industrial society, though it’s not clear whether that metaplot would be central to the animated shorts or the focus of the full length film.
Full details of the project can be found here.
