Mia Wasikowska is Tim Burton’s Alice

Anglophile film director Tim Burton has deployed his trademark dark vision for a remake of Lewis Carroll's classic children's tale, Alice in Wonderland. An advance release of 'concept art' for the film shows Burton conjuring up magical gardens populated by talking roses, forests of giant mushrooms and the usual suspects among the cast.

Johnny Depp, on his seventh collaboration with Burton, plays the Mad Hatter in a shocking ginger fright wig and porcelain-white stage make-up. The film's producer Richard Zanuck has described the accent put on by the "fun and nutty" Depp as indescribable - although that could just as easily have applied to the American's stab at Cockney in Sweeney Todd.

Burton's wife Helena Bonham Carter takes on the role of the Queen of Hearts looking like a freak show version of Queen Elizabeth I - her head has been swelled in digital post-production. The Queen's customary cry of "Off with their heads" remains, and the moat of her castle is filled with hundreds of decapitated bonces. Anne Hathaway plays the altogether more restrained White Queen, while Little Britain's Matt Lucas is both Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

The role of Alice goes to relative unknown Mia Wasikowska, a 19-year-old Australian who appears in HBO's medical series In Treatment. Zanuck calls her "real, honest and sincere" and "not a typical Hollywood starlet". The film called for an Alice who has a "certain kind of emotional toughness, standing her ground in a way that makes her kind of an older person with a younger person's mentality," according to Burton.

The 3-D film is due to be released next March.