My favourite screen adaptation of Carroll's classic novel, because it's so different from the cute dreamy candy-coloured wonderland which Alice is usually visiting. I still haven't read the source material; I probably think I've become too old for it by now, but that's just a stupid excuse. Or maybe because I know the story inside and out (as depicted by Disney and other overly optimistic offerers). That's why I was so positively surprised by Svankmajer's dark and eerie version, far from what I would have expected even when I read the filmmaker's name. Svankmajer does make strange little films, from what I know and saw so far, sometimes even quite whacky stuff. This film is no exception, but it has an uniquely morbid atmosphere due to the fascinating stop-motion animation and the unsettling sound effects. There's no conventional dialog which is reduced to a minimum and mostly recited by Alice herself from a third person perspective with the attachment "...says the white rabbit" et al. This technique doesn't allow us to feel with and for Alice and to delve into her fate; it rather makes us aware that we are merely within a tale. There's no way we can get lost in the intellectual world of six-year-old Alice; she remains to be a self-contained, pretty incommunicative little girl that's just trying to get out of this nightmare (without being ignorant to oddities that constantly pass her way out), and we are just observers of her dream. It's a film made not for everyone for sure; as a squeamish romantic or a lover of the more optimistic versions, you'd probably hate it. I, for one, am all in for a morbid, decayed, rotten cinematic vision, especially when it hits a children's classic and completely turns it upside down.
Review of Alice
