Alice

If you like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton films, you'll eat this up with a spoon. Lewis Carroll purists and Disney fans, run away

Minor spoilers

Jan Švankmajer is not exactly a household name outside his native city of Prague in the Czech Republic. In fact, if you're an average moviegoer, this may well be the first time you've ever seen his name. But if you enjoyed movies like Brazil, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Toy Story, you owe this obscure filmmaker a debt of gratitude. The people responsible for making these movies are all big fans of Švankmajer, a master animator and decidedly surrealistic filmmaker.

Alice (original Czech title: Něco z Alenky) is one of a tiny handful of feature films created by Švankmajer, who usually prefers short subjects over full-length movies. My artsy-fartsy friends have been encouraging me to see this film since 1988, shortly after it was released, but I didn't have the time or desire to track it down. Then, almost by accident, I came across a VHS copy at Hollywood Video. My curiosity was piqued, and I took it home.

Knowing what I know now about this very free-wheeling retelling of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," I'm glad the Wee Bairn was asleep in bed before I popped this in the VCR.

We begin with Alice sitting by the riverside, chucking rocks into the water and resignedly thumbing through her sister's book (in which there are no pictures). But moments into watching this film, you know you're not in for a Disneyized rehash of the Lewis Carroll book. The next scene is in Alice's room, where she has presumably been banished as a punishment, and the first thing you notice is that this room was not designed for a child. Filled with beetles on pins, stuffed taxidermy animals, unidentifiable preserves in jars, and other miscellaneous flotsam, the whole area resembles nothing so much as a junk room (with the unspoken assumption that Alice is just another piece of junk). As she sulks, throwing pebbles into a teacup, the stuffed white rabbit in a glass display case comes creepily to life, gets dressed and hops away on business unknown, leaking sawdust like blood from a gaping hole in his chest. As Alice follows this undead rabbit with bulging eyes, she is led deeper and deeper into a Wonderland that lurks primarily in the unexplored corners of the id.

There are some strange turns in the visuals of the film: the gateway to Wonderland is not a rabbit hole, but the drawer of a writing desk; instead of falling down the hole, Alice is lowered slowly down a rickety elevator past shelves of disturbing knickknacks. The Caterpillar is made up of a sock, a set of glass eyes and some false teeth; when he wants to sleep, he darns his own eyes shut. The Mad Hatter is a wooden puppet; the March Hare a paraplegic stuffed rabbit. Many of the zombie-like creatures are made up of a combination of sawdust-stuffed taxidermy animals and bleached animal skulls. Rarely is Alice outside; almost all the scenes take place within the various rooms of a fearsome, dilapidated old house.

The Alice of this film, Kristýna Kohoutová, is a beautiful little girl with wide porcelain-blue eyes, solemn and observant. She remains remarkably serene throughout her many disturbing adventures—a quality which, strangely enough, makes the film even more creepy, giving every scene a sense of fatal inevitability. She is so doll-like that, on occasions where Alice is supposed to shrink, Kohoutová is replaced with a porcelain doll—and it works.

There are some ideas that don't work, though. Interleaved with the credits and throughout the film are extreme close-ups of Alice's mouth, telling us (in dubbed English over the original Czech) bits in between the dialogue, such as "Said the white rabbit" and "Thought Alice to herself." The concept is interesting at first, but it soon becomes a tiresome gimmick. There's also a lot of repetition—Alice is constantly finding a desk drawer, trying to open it, and succeeding only in pulling out the handle; the Mad Hatter and March Hare scene never seems to end.

I wouldn't recommend this film to most friends, because it is as surreal, creepy and disturbing as a nightmare. But for those who like the feel of nightmares in a film, or for those who just want to get into a Halloween mood, Alice might fit the bill.

One final caveat: Don't watch this film on drugs. You'll claw your face off.

All material displayed on this website is © 2001-2009 by S. B. Houghton, writing under the alias "The Pirate King." All rights reserved.
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