"Disney + Buñuel = Svankmajer's ALICE." An unusual dramatization of a classic children's story, from Czech master animator Jan Svankmajer.
Full Synposis: This loose retelling of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" dives headlong into the story's more sordid, psychological dimensions. Svankmajer's rabbit hole is deeper, darker and far more twisted. All the gilded polish of high society has been rubbed away, leaving a rawer, subtler surface in its place. This rabbit may rhyme and check his pocket watch, but he also makes a meal of his own stuffing. Though Svankmajer's ALICE makes for stronger medicine to swallow, it strikes all the more directly at the heart of Carroll's ecstatic nightmare.
Through a seamless combination of live action, toy objects and animation, Svankmajer creates a surreal dream world unlike any other presented on film. The film takes Carroll's meandering novel and turns it into nothing short of aimless. "Alice in Wonderland" has always been regarded for its startling visual poetry, for the way it subjected story to the surreal.
ALICE picks up Carroll's experiment where he left off, discarding any of the author's nominal attempts at narrative coherence. The film knits together a bizarrely beautiful yarn, with a train of images that could only be hatched by the most fanciful of imaginations. ALICE melts from one eye-popping fantasy to the next, throwing all the burdens of continuity to the wind: squirming socks don plastic eyeballs and grinning dentures to become scuttling caterpillars, a rat draped in blue velvet swims through a flooded room to strike a bonfire atop Alice's head and a rabbit bursts through his display case, slips into a red overcoat and disappears into a wooden drawer.
Alice is actually the only living thing amid all the objects and drawings that Svankmajer brings to life. Rarely has stop motion cinema looked so real, everything seems to move of its own accord, as if real muscles were springing into motion.
But Alice is not the only thing that really moves, she is the only thing that really speaks as well, delivering both her lines and the lines of all the other characters. This Brechtian sort of gesture reveals wonderland as a world of Alice's own making.
Ultimately, her trip down the rabbit hole is nothing but child's play, an eerie intiation into a young unfettered mind. ALICE hits all the right notes with the kind of strange, wonderous atmosphere that would have made Mr. Carroll proud.
