cloudmonkey

I just saw the wonderfully strange film Alice on DVD. Directed by Czech animator Jan Svankmajer, this combination of stop-motion animation and live action is a dark and surrealistic version of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

In this version of the story, Alice is listlessly playing in a messy study filled with animal skeletons and other biological specimens, when a stuffed white rabbit in a glass specimen case comes to life. Pulling its feet free of the nails holding them to the floor of the case, the rabbit breaks out and disappears down a desk drawer. Alice follows it down the drawer and into a Wonderland consisting of a child's eye view of gritty urban interiors: storage rooms, basements, elevators, laundry rooms, etc.

Some images from the film:

The White Rabbit, a real taxidermied rabbit, pulls its watch from its sawdust-filled chest cavity, then licks the watch face free of sawdust so it can read the time.

Alice enters a room filled with socks that burrow like worms through the wooden floor. At the far end of the room is The Caterpillar, animated from a sock with false teeth and glass eyes. After The Caterpillar gives Alice the mushroom, an animated needle sows its eyeholes closed for sleep.

Alice is beset by an army animated from animal skulls and other bones.

The film stays remarkably close to Lewis Carroll's original story but gives it a very different subtext of anger and frustration with the adult world—and perhaps, by extension, with the repressive Czechoslovakian government then in power. This subtext is made apparent by the framing device that begins the film. The film opens on a little girl and an adult woman, whose face we never see, sitting together on the bank of a stream. The woman reads while the girl desultorily tosses pebbles into the water. Bored, the girl pulls at the woman's book and gets her hand slapped. The scene cuts to the girl's face in close-up announcing that she is going to tell a story about a girl named Alice, and, as the story proceeds, the girl continues to narrate all dialog in the film. Clearly the story told by the little girl is intended to comment upon this initial disturbing scene.

Check out this website about Jan Svankmajer.

Here's an interview with Jan Svankmajer about his most recent film.

Buy the DVD from Amazon.com.