On the shortlist of artists with wildly vivid imaginations, Tim Burton occupies a special place.

From his early days as an idea man at Disney Animation through a filmmaking career that has produced an unequaled array of visually groundbreaking movies, this peerless writer/director/producer has left an indelible mark on cinema.

Who better, then, to assemble a film that so definitively demonstrates the absurdity of the "new" 3-D technology.

Burton's luscious expansion of Lewis Carroll's classic Alice novels — "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass" — in all of its kaleidoscopic, two-dimensional brilliance, exposes Hollywood's big push toward 3-D moviegoing as a baldfaced commercial ploy that's significantly more hype than substance.

Back-to-back viewings of "Alice in Wonderland" in both the traditional and funny-glasses formats yield little or no added value in the third dimension. The Bandersnatch is no more frumious; the Jabberwock whiffles and burbles with no greater intensity; and the rows of knuckles gripping the movie-theater armrests appear no less white at the conclusion of Alice's epic plummet down the rabbit hole.

The studio executives and fad peddlers selling this technology to the public love to cite the vast strides 3-D has made since its last big revival in the early 1980s, while conveniently ignoring the more commanding advances in traditional moviemaking. (CGI, anyone?) They neglect to mention that today's big-budget animation, action, adventure and sci-fi pics already appear more three-dimensional than ever before.

The floundering film industry, desperate to get people back in the seats, seems intent on repackaging a technology that hasn't changed significantly since its invention in the mid-19th century. Stereoscopic viewing simply involves looking through an image-altering device that creates an illusion of depth. While today's devices are more sleek and compact — basically a large pair of sunglasses — they still place a noticeable physical barrier between audience and image.

Half the fun of going to the movies is getting lost in a story, allowing yourself to be sucked into extraordinary lives and predicaments. That's kind of hard to do with "advanced" technology perpetually accentuating the artifice of the experience.

For folks who don't normally wear glasses, 3-D frames are hard to ignore; for folks who do wear glasses, having an extra pair perched in front can be downright annoying.

Glasses aside, the very thing that makes 3-D so cool — the image that leaps from the screen — reinforces its limitations. Those butterflies fluttering there in the half-light, those dandelion seeds dancing over the first 10 rows of the movie theater — they always disappear abruptly at the edge of the screen. Every tantalizing morsel of 3-D movie magic is punctuated with a blunt reminder of the movie's boundaries, which makes it tough to suspend reality.

Stereoscopic technology has its place (who doesn't love the View-Master?), but apart from the occasional gimmick ("Jaws" was probably pretty cool in 3-D), that place is not the movie theater.

To today's vigorously illustrated adventures, such as "Alice in Wonderland," 3-D adds nothing of consequence.

Correction: It does add at least $2 to an already-expensive ticket price.