released 27 mar 03 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* My interest in animation sometimes takes me in strange directions. Almost by accident I picked up Jan Svankmajer's ALICE, another animated take on Lewis Carroll's ALICE IN WONDERLAND, and on watching it had my mind completely blown for an hour and a half.
Svankmajer's ALICE is not a cartoon as such. It's a combination of live-action film and stop-action photography with models -- some very unusual models. If most productions of ALICE IN WONDERLAND have the appearance of a childhood dream, Svankmajer's version seems to reflect a childhood nightmare. Wonderland is not a place of green parks and flowing streams, but more like a huge old dark and dingy house with an odd "dimensional transcendence", its curving stairs and dark rooms connected in disjointed ways.
When Alice (played by the astonishingly pretty Katryna Kohoutova) is locked inside a pantry (by a series of events I would be hard-pressed to reasonably describe) she finds in it odd jars containing faintly-decayed food and ticking watches; a rack of eggs hatches out tiny skulls (of mice?) that scuttle away and hide; a tin that rattles and contains, on being opened, squirming woodlice. Alice picks up a small loaf of bread that grows nailheads as she tries to bite into it; a slab of meat peeks out of a pot, then slithers across the floor and slides into another one.
Svankmajer's ALICE is not necessarily fun to watch. It seems to have been deliberately made slow-moving (the droning TICK TICK TICK of watches is a continuing theme through the film) and its imagery also seems to have been devised to be grating and sometimes repellent, like running fingernails over a blackboard. Sometimes it seems to fall into the annoying pretensions of art-house cinema. However, if you're tired of watching Hollywood blow things up and can prepare yourself to be patient, this movie has enough surprises in it to keep your head continuously spinning.