Alan Rickman's last movie. He died four months before the release. This movie is dedicated to his memory. His final non-voice acting role was in Eye in the Sky (2015), which was released before he died.
The character of Time does not appear in either of Lewis Carroll's two Alice books, but is mentioned in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7. The Mad Hatter tells Alice that he had quarrelled with Time, and in fact had been sentenced to death for murdering time. Ever since then, time cursed The Mad Hatter so that "it's always tea-time, and we've no time to wash the things between whiles." This is nodded to in this film, when Time, after crash-landing, traps the Mad Hatter, the Dormouse, and the March Hare in a specific time to keep them from hindering him.
The Red Queen's Castle Guards are creatures made of composite vegetables, modelled on the works of artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1595). The Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books.