OFFICIAL: Depp in "Wonderland"

After months of speculation, it has been made official: Johnny Depp will play the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

Dick Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, has confirmed this on Wednesday.

In addition to Alice, Depp will also be in two other upcoming Disney films: he will return as Captain Jack Sparrow in the fourth installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and as the Lone Ranger's sidekick, Tonto, in a new cinematic adaption of the western serial (Depp is part Cherokee in addition to his German and Irish ancestry).

It has also been declared that Oscar-winning VFX supervisor Ken Ralston (who won awards for Robert Zemeckis' films Forrest Gump and Who Framed Roger Rabbit) is on set in London as the senior visual effects supervisor, working with Sony Pictures Imageworks on the animation. David Schaub is the animation supervisor and Sean Phillips and Carey Villegas are visual effects supervisors for Imageworks.


But after all of this talk about Alice in Wonderland, some of us are still wondering about Tim Burton's other film in his two-flick agreement with Walt Disney Studios: a feature-length, stop-motion animated version of Frankenweenie.

The fact is, no big recent news has come up, but it is still in the works (Burton confirmed this on the new DVD release of The Nightmare Before Christmas). Production will commence on the stop-motion adaptation as soon as shooting for Alice is completed (right now, pre-production is going underway). Both Frankenweenie and Alice in Wonderland will be released in theaters presented in Disney Digital 3-D (as will many of the studio's other future projects).

No word on whether Depp will provide his voice for Frankenweenie yet, though.