But where’s Toto?

I suppose, in the dusty remnants of my once youthful memory, two films have always stuck out as classic “babes in distress” tales. In “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy was a girl on a mission. Hit the (yellow) bricks, find the ruby slippers and get the heck out of Dodge. One might even say it was an American modernization of “The Odyssey,” Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem.

And then there was Alice, a shy stranger in a strange land. To me, she always evoked a fateful childhood trip to a roadside carnival, that time you slip away from Mommy or Daddy’s sight and wander through an exotic landscape of the surreal.

In my mind, way back when, Dorothy was the doer, Alice was the dreamer.

When my stepdaughter Nicky was 5, she disappeared inside Circus Circus for nearly an hour. (Talk about adventures in wonderland.) For Nicky, and Alice, the journey was its own reward—no quests, no logic, no revelations of deep consequence—only unbounded imagination set free.

When I first learned of Tim Burton’s 3-D “Alice in Wonder land,” I anticipated an exquisite thrill of losing myself in wonderland as well, taking an extraordinary visual journey that would, in terms of ancient tribal hippie vernacular, “blow my mind.”

But I suppose the difference between Hollywood protocol and weird Uncle Charlie is that sometimes a story is required. Lewis Carroll was Charles Dodgson’s pen name, and it was Alice Liddell, a friend’s daughter, who reputedly urged Charles to write down his frequent plot-lite narratives.

It’s also fairly obvious to some of us that Uncle Charlie was— again in that colloquial ’60s lingo —something of a freak . C’mon, mushrooms and hookahs and pillinduced hallucinations? Would you leave your kids alone with this man?

But I digress. Out of Lewis Carroll’s fertile, dubiously fueled imagination sprang a blissfully logic-free classic that’s lasted 150 years.

Yet director Burton immediately infuses Alice with purpose and logic, with Oz-like tasks, including slaying the dreaded Jabberwocky. No longer is she (as are we) able to meander through this immense wonderland, content to witness and explore and be confounded by the strange and unordinary.

Once we slip down the rabbit hole, there’s precious little time to ogle the nightmarish 3-D opulence that zooms by as Alice begins her role as conquering heroine. The lion, the scarecrow and the tin man—sorry, the white rabbit, the March Hare and the Mad Hatter— escort her toward her inevitable confrontation with the Red Queen.

Yes, there’s a white queen as well, and I wouldn’t be surprised if her name was Glinda.

If I sound petulant, I suppose it’s only to hide my personal disappointment in not having been allowed more free rein to explore and, well, to wonder with Alice. I mean, “Alice in Wonderland” isn’t a bad movie—as a Tim Burton film, it just seems overwhelmingly ordinary, a by-the-numbers example of what a film of his is supposed to look like. Quite the enigma.

But the kids will love it (older children, I might caution, and those not prone to nightmares. There are a few bloodless beheadings and scary visuals that younger tykes may not enjoy).

And Johnny Depp does a decent job as the Hatter—although one has the impression that his screen time was extended because he is Johnny Depp. Mia Wasikowska does an admirable job as Alice, and Helena Bonham Carter is exceptional as the pouty Red Queen. (The film even offers an explanation for why she’s pouty, but do we really need to know why?)

I guess that’s my complaint in a nutshell: too much explanation, too little observation. The inquisitive child within me, for much of the movie, was too busy taking notes.