“Alice thought to herself, ‘Now you will see a film made for children… perhaps. But—I nearly forgot—you must close your eyes. Otherwise, you won’t see anything.'”–Opening narration to Alice
DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer
FEATURING: Kristýna Kohoutová, voice of Camilla Power (in English dubbed version)
PLOT: A bored young girl sits in a drab room throwing stones into a teacup when she suddenly sees a stuffed white rabbit in a display case come to life, pull a sawdust-covered stopwatch from inside its torso, and disappear into a desk drawer. She follows it and winds up in a strange land full of talking socks, slithering steaks, and menacing skull-headed animals with razor sharp teeth. The girl follows the white rabbit through a series of bizarre rooms until he leads her to a playing card king and queen who order the rabbit to cut off her head with the pair of scissors he carries.
BACKGROUND:
- Alice was Jan Svankmajer’s first feature length film after making award-winning short films for twenty-four years. After Alice he returned to making shorts for six years before he made his next feature, Faust, in 1994.
- Before branching out into filmmaking, Svankmajer’s primary training had been in building marionettes.
- Svankmajer sneaks a couple of references to classic horror/suspense films into Alice: a scene where Alice is menaced by a flying creature is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), and a scene where the White Rabbit takes an axe to a door and then sticks his head through the hole is a blackly funny citation to Kubrick‘s The Shining (1980).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Although it’s difficult to top the bony “animals” that look like they were reassembled at random from a jumbled pile of a paleontologist’s relics, it’s the White Rabbit who makes the biggest impression, from the moment he comes to life and pulls his paws out from the display case floor where they had been nailed. His strangest habit is licking sawdust (his own guts) off the pocket watch he keeps stashed inside a wound-like gash in his torso.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: “Alice in Wonderland” is a nonsense fantasy, a fairy tale of fractured reality; it makes a perfect template for a weird movie, but no adaptation has taken the story so deep into the frightening labyrinths of the subconscious as this uncanny animation. Carroll’s and Svankmajer’s opposite talents and sensibilities complement each other perfectly, like pure cane sugar mixed with white powder heroin.
Clip from Alice
COMMENTS: “Alice in Wonderland” has been adapted for the screen a dozen times, and the Continue reading 75. ALICE [NECO Z ALENKY] (1988)
