By LARRY ROHTER

Instead of Wonderland, it’s Underland. Instead of Alice as a bored but clever child, we get Alice as a 19-yearold rebel and warrior, dispatching the monstrous Jabberwocky with a magic sword. Disney’s second rendering of Lewis Carroll’s fantasy is a world apart from both its 1951 cartoon version and the original Victorian-era text.

Directed by Tim Burton, “Alice in Wonderland,” a 3-D blend of live action and animation that opens in March and April globally, is meant as a contemporary, subversive take on a cherished story. With the 20-year-old Australian actress Mia Wasikowska as Alice, it begins with an unwanted marriage proposal before veering off into Underland, where Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen await.

Since “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and its sequel, “Through the Looking-Glass,” were first published nearly 150 years ago, Alice’s tale has been retold in many versions and many media, including as a musical, anime, video game and more than a score of film and television adaptations. But for Mr. Burton the very abundance and familiarity of the material “in the subconscious and in the culture” was an incentive to take it on.

“I’ve seen mostly everything, but there’s never been a version for me that particularly works, that I especially like or that blows me away,” he said . “It always ends up seeming like a clueless little girl wandering around with a bunch of weirdos. And the fact that there was no one definitive version was helpful. It’s not like the Disney cartoon was the greatest. So I didn’t feel that pressure to match or surpass.”

Linda Woolverton, the film’s screenwriter, said that when she began her script, she “did a lot of research on Victorian mores, on how young girls were supposed to behave, and then did exactly the opposite.” As she put it, “I was thinking more in terms of an action- adventure film with a female protagonist” than a Victorian maiden.

The river of tears that a confused Alice cries in Carroll’s original text upon arrival in Wonderland has been written out of the story. “I couldn’t have her break down like that,” Ms. Woolverton said. A drawing by John Tenniel, the illustrator who worked with Carroll, showing a boy fighting the dragonlike Jabberwock, was transformed into an image depicting Alice in action.

Refusing to marry, Alice instead decides to prove her mettle by shipping out to a trading post her father’s company plans to open in a China that, under force of British arms, has just been compelled to legalize the opium trade, cede Hong Kong and allow its citizens to be sent abroad as indentured servants.

“We’re not that concerned about being historically accurate in a film like this,” said Richard D. Zanuck, one of the movie’s producers. “It’s a piece of entertainment where you have a heroine off to another adventure at the end, and unless I’m wrong, people of all nationalities will just enjoy it as an entertainment and not try to interpret it.”

Carroll scholars say that new readings and Mr. Burton’s film are to be expected, given that Alice and her story are so malleable.

Mr. Burton said that he sees his version of “Alice in Wonderland” as primarily a lark, surreal and comedic but essentially benign. “I kind of went out of my way to not make it too dark,” he said, adding that his attitude was “Let’s not veer off into that; let it be what it is.”