Psycho's Movie Reviews #79: ALICE (1988)

Alice is a 1988 surrealist dark fantasy film written and directed by Jan Švankmajer. Its original Czech title is Něco z Alenky, which means "Something from Alice". It is a loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll's first Alice book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), about a girl who follows a white rabbit into a bizarre fantasy land. Alice is played by Kristýna Kohoutová. The film combines live action with stop motion animation, and is distinguished by its dark and uncompromising production design.

For Švankmajer, a prolific director of short films for more than two decades, Alice became his first venture into feature-length filmmaking. The director had been disappointed by other adaptations of Carroll's book, which interpret it as a fairy tale. His aim was instead to make the story play out like an amoral dream. The film won the feature film award at the 1989 Annecy International Animated Film Festival.

Plot:

The film opens on Alice sitting by a brook. A close-up of her mouth informs the audience that they will now see a film, instructing them to close their eyes "otherwise you won't see anything!"

The film goes to Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) in her sitting room. A mysterious creaking noise draws her attention to a taxidermic White Rabbit in a glass case. Alice hides beneath a writing desk while the Rabbit first dresses himself, then opens a hidden drawer to reveal a pair of scissors with which he smashes the case, freeing himself.

Alice chases the Rabbit out of the house into a field, where she sees a writing desk identical to the one from her sitting room. The Rabbit crawls inside the desk's drawer and disappears. Alice crawls after him and finds herself in a cave, where she stumbles into a wastebasket that turns into in an elevator that deposits her atop a large pile of leaves. Alice searches for the rabbit in the leaves, when the leaves suddenly begin to stir on their own power, eventually revealing another, identical writing desk in which Alice finds a tiny key. Alice uses the key to open a miniature door just in time to see the Rabbit vanish disappear into a painted garden; she herself is much too large to fit.

Alice finds a bottle of ink labelled "Drink Me." Drinking it transforms her into a small china doll identical to herself. Now she is the correct size to fit through the door but finds she has left the key in the writing desk. She then finds a butter tart that causes her to grow enormous. This allows her to retrieve the key, but she once again does not fit through the door. Frustrated, Alice cries until the room floods with tears. The white rabbit rows by dropping a tray of tarts which float past Alice. Eating one of these returns Alice to her doll-size and she is able to retrieve the key from the floating desk and follow the Rabbit.

Once through the door, she finds herself at the banks of a brook in the countryside and encounters the White Rabbit, who mistakes her for his housemaid and commands her to fetch his scissors from his rabbit-cage-like house. While searching for the scissors, she drinks from another ink bottle and returns to her true size, but finds herself trapped inside the now too-small house. The Rabbit and his animal companions try to force her out by launching a skull-head lizard through the window. Alice kicks him away, causing him to burst and spill his sawdust innards. The angry animals finally imprison the girl by submerging her in a pot of milk, trapping her inside a giant Alice-shaped doll, which they lock inside a storage room filled with specimen jars.

Alice breaks free of the doll. Inside a sardine can, she discovers a key and escapes the storage room, stepping into a long hall with many doors. Behind one of them, she meets a stocking-Caterpillar in a room swarming with smaller sock-worms that bore holes in the floor. Alice's own socks crawl off her feet and join the others. The Caterpillar tells her that one half of his darning mushroom causes things to grow, while the other half causes things to shrunk. The Caterpillar then falls asleep by sewing his eyes shut. Alice takes parts of the mushroom, retrieves her wayward socks, and exits. She tries the wooden mushroom, only to find it causes trees to grow and shrink; Alice herself remains unchanged.

Now in a forest that grew from the mushroom, she follows the sound of a crying baby to a tiny dollhouse stormed shaking from a violent fight within. Using the mushroom to make the house grow, she discovers the Rabbit inside tending a piglet in baby's clothes. The rabbit escapes while Alice chases the piglet downstairs, where a tea party mechanically proceeds without end, hosted by a wind-up March Hare and a wooden marionette Hatter. The Hatter produces the White Rabbit from inside its hat. The Rabbit flees to the attic and Alice follows.

Behind a curtain of old clothes, Alice finds the painted garden, which is really the set of a play. The King and Queen of Hearts, followed by a troop of playing cards, march into the garden. Two of the Jacks are engaged in a swordfight. The Queen commands the White Rabbit, her executioner, to behead the Jacks; he does so with his scissors. A card-playing Hatter and Hare are also beheaded, only to exchange their heads and keep playing.

The Queen invites Alice to play croquet, only for the game to end in chaos when the mallets and balls turn into live-action chickens and hedgehogs. The White Rabbit delivers a script to a puzzled Alice. She presents herself into a courtroom where she finds herself on trial for eating the Queen's tarts. Alice points out that the tarts are sitting untouched in the courtroom, but the King insists she stick to the script. Annoyed, Alice eats the tarts, which causes her head to shapeshift into that of other characters. The Queen demands all her heads be cut off, and the Rabbit advances with his scissors.

Abruptly, Alice wakes in her sitting room. Around the room are the various household objects that populated her dream: playing cards scattered on her lap, china dolls, marionettes, an inkwell, and socks in a sewing basket. The case that formerly contained the taxadermic rabbit is now shattered and empty. Discovering a hidden drawer in the interior of the broken case, she opens it to reveal the White Rabbit's scissors. Examining the scissors, Alice says to herself, "He's late, as usual. I think I'll cut his head off."

Production:

Jan Švankmajer, who had been making short films since the mid-1960s, says he got the confidence to make a feature-length film after finishing the shorts Jabberwocky and Down to the Cellar. He described Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a work which had followed him since he was a child, as "one of the most important and amazing books produced by this civilisation." He argued that other film adaptations of the story had interpreted it as a fairy tale, but that Carroll had written it like a dream, and that was what he wanted to transmit: "While a fairy tale has got an educational aspect – it works with the moral of the lifted forefinger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realisation of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realised dream." Despite the film's heavy usage of stop motion, and unlike most other traditional stop motion films, the movie does not utilize any miniature sets to portray its special effects.

Release/Reception/Box Office:

The film premiered in the United States, where it was released on 3 August 1988. It played at the 1989 Annecy International Animated Film Festival where it received the prize for best feature film. In Czechoslovakia it premiered on 1 November 1990. The English dubbed version features the voice of Camilla Power.

In The New York Times, Caryn James wrote that although Švankmajer "strips away all sweetness and light, he does not violate Lewis Carroll's story", and called Alice an "extraordinary film which explores the story's dark undercurrents". James described the animation as "remarkably fluid" and held forward the dynamics of the film, which contrasts visually captivating elements with superficiality: "Mr. Švankmajer never lets us forget we are watching a film in which an actress plays Alice telling a story", although, "with its extreme close-ups, its constant motion and its smooth animation, the film is so visually active that it distracts us from a heavy-handed fact - this is a world of symbols come alive." Upon the British home-media release in 2011, Philip Horne reviewed the film for The Daily Telegraph. Horne called it "an astonishing film", and wrote: "This is no cleaned up version approved by preview audiences or committees of studio executives – my youthful fellow-spectator declared quite aptly at one point, 'She's rather a violent young girl, isn't she?' – but its glorious proliferation of magical transformations works like a charm on anyone who values the imagination." The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes has Alice with a "Fresh" rating of 100% based on 18 reviews.

Box Office Total: {There's no sign of the Box Office score anywhere, so I imagine if didn't do that well}

My Review:

"Alice" (1988), is one of the greatest stop motion films ever created. The deep, dark, crevices of Lewis Carroll's brain are only expanded upon, and lifted, by the masterful vision of Jan Švankmajer. A must watch for anyone looking to explore alternative styles in cinema.

For acid and shrooms! Although I'd microdose and watch it with a friend so your mind doesn't turn too far inward. You could end up paranoid and unhappy. However, with an optimistic outlook you'll be clutching your sides coping with gales of uncontrolled laughter while the "White Rabbit" chitters your mind away!

From the beginning you will be able to tell this is not your beloved "Children's" classic, but a rather twisted derivation of it. Impossibly hard to follow, the film is a sensory overload of grotesque imagery and unsettling symbolism that portray the original story in an original, tormented sort of way. The stop motion animation continuously gets more impressive over the course of the film and helps to straddle the line between the physical reality and fantasy of what's going on.

There have been many more faithful filmed versions of the books, not always to their credit; these are not, by their nature, the kind of books which do well by literalism, whether in reading or in translating the prose to life. What Švankmajer's Alice does better than any other version of the book I can name is to capture the sensibility of Carroll. Simply put, this is the only filmed version of the material that I've seen (and there are so many films based on the book that neither I nor probably anybody else has seen every last one of them) that persuasively places us right in the middle of a child's nightmare. And that setting is, after all, the one concrete thing we can say about the books.

There’s a reason that Jan Svankmajer’s reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s seminal children’s fable is titled simply Alice – namely, because the bizarre, unsettling and occasionally terrifying world that his pint-sized heroine (Kristyna Kohoutova) magically enters is anything but a delightful wonderland. Melding live-action with stop-motion animation, Svankmajer remains largely faithful to his source material’s narrative arc while bestowing it with a bustling undercurrent of psycho-sexual menace derived from phallic/penetration imagery (slithering sock puppet caterpillars, a fat, meaty frog’s tongue) and grotesque, violent visuals (the white rabbit bleeding sawdust and then repeatedly licking it off his watch, scissor beheadings, the March Hare moving about in a rickety wheelchair). The director’s synthesis of the authentic and the artificial (replete with frighteningly creaking, clanging sound effects) – as well as his refusal to bookend the fantastical action with comforting visions of the waking world – allows Alice to tap into the element of nightmarish dread that’s always coloured the classic kid’s story, and his sparse use of English narration (delivered via fetishistic, out-of-sync close-ups of Kohoutova’s mouth) highlights the power of the spoken word while also contributing to the overriding air of unreality. Eerily evocative and disturbingly potent, Svankmajer’s surrealist adaptation is a welcome antidote to the cute and cuddly Disneyfication of Carroll’s iconic tale.

This is a dark, surrealist interpretation of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by the brilliant Czech animator Jan Svankmajer. The director combines live action and puppet animation to create a disturbing vision of Alice's world, filled with images of death and violence. Although all the action takes place within a dream, Svankmajer, in true surrealist spirit, keeps the line between dream and reality ambiguous. Alice is the only live creature in the film, and it is she who supplies the voices of her (often grotesque) animated companions. In one scene typical of Svankmajer's command of dream logic, the girl becomes her own doll. ALICE is macabre, haunting, and very true to the spirit of Carroll's book, exploring the marvels and fears of a child's imagination; 5/5.

{It's free to watch on YouTube, but I posted it to save you some time}.