Details are beginning to emerge about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland project, and it looks like Tim still thinks the world of entertainment holds exactly one composer and three actors—four, tops. Helena Bonham Carter will play the Red Queen, who will spend much of the movie yelling “Off with their heads!” at just about everybody. (Hint: What’s wrong with this picture?) On a slightly more interesting note, Anne Hathaway has been named to play HBC’s kindly sister the White Queen, who sends Alice on a quest to find the Bandersnatch.

Alert readers will have spotted the problem here. The head-happy queen in Alice is the Queen of Hearts; the Red and White Queens don’t show up until Through the Looking-Glass. And the Bandersnatch barely shows up in Through the Looking-Glass but plays a bigger role in The Hunting of the Snark, which has no connection with the two Alice books. In other words, Burton is dicking around with his source material in a major way. He’s hardly the first to do this to Lewis Carroll, and we’ll have to wait until spring of 2010 to find out whether or not his alterations work. But it looks like those who were hoping to see a faithful adaptation of Alice will be waiting a lot longer than that.