Jan Svankmajer's Alice (1988) (DVDRIP)

Alice 1988

Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer's Alice (1988) is a creepy and disturbing adaptaion of Lewis Carroll's perennial literary classic, and perhaps the most faithful the original work. Combining a live-action Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) with a Wonderland filled with threatening stop-motion characters, Svankmajer's deliberately crude style of animation, use of close-ups, and rich design work lend the film a pervading sense of unease and a menacing dream-logic which marries a sly visual wit with piercing psychological insight.
Since the 1960's, Jan Svankmajer has been frying brains around the world with his incredibly original, surrealist animation. After years of trail-blazing short films, in 1988 he finally decided to make a feature, and could not have picked a more suitable subject for his style.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been inspirational to artists, and specifically filmmakers since the very dawn of the moving picture. Its twists and turns and mad tangents into proto-surrealist dreams is the exact type of material that lends itself well to Svankmajer's unique vision. His Alice which is inspired by, but not slavishly adherent to, Carroll's text is a beast entirely on its own. Using real creatures that could be found in a child's domain to bring to life Alice's fantasy world is a stroke of genius that allows this little girl's fantasy to seem all the more real.

The story is told entirely as though it were narrated by Alice, almost to the point of annoyance as every spoken line from her ends with, "said the white rabbit". However, this method, again, helps keep the viewer grounded in the dream illusion, and somehow takes away a little bit of the potential scariness, which helps the film live up to the caption at the beginning that states that Alice is "a film for children". Without the narration, it would veer too far into the realm of the bizarre and perhaps lose a bit of the distance that Svankmajer deliberately creates.

Alice is a masterpiece of hand-crafted stop-motion animation. Svankmajer's influence on artists like the US's Brothers Quay and others cannot be overstated, and this piece is a wonderful introduction to the man's body of work, which spans 25 years in either direction from Alice.



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