If anything, it’s about what this so-called adventure tells us about her mind. It isn’t about how Alice’s adventure changes her. Alice continues her pursuit of the White Rabbit, but the film glides along with a dreamlike logic that is less concerned with narrative arcs than it is with presenting a barrage of strange and disturbing events that make up her odyssey. The scenes in Alice are vaguely connected. It's a brooding, almost depressive pallet of colors or lack thereof. Eschewing the kaleidoscopic psychedelia of the most famous Wonderland adaptations, Alice washes all the lavish, confectionary colors for hues of lifeless browns and grays. Though spectacular on a technical level, the animation often feels uncomfortably real, which is aided by the movie's drab aesthetic. Using these real-life props and maneuvering them meticulously through the elaborate sets is nothing short of a wonder. It's absolutely worth noting that the stop-motion animation in Alice is an absolutely fantastic artistic achievement. By casting a real live girl in the role of Alice, and by “casting” an array of real-life objects animated by cinematic magic, Alice is made impossibly uncanny. It wouldn’t be right to call this a realistic imagining of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but it’s practically as close as we’ll get. It’s always Alice's voice, and she speaks the lines as if reading from a storybook. They never speak-they’re dead animals, after all-but Alice narrates their would-be lines of dialogue as the center of the tale and thus the logical storyteller. With only a single living actor in the film (Kohoutová, who plays Alice with a matter-of-fact conviction), the rest of the “cast” is made up of the previously mentioned taxidermy animals and macabre creations of bones, skulls, and body parts. If a real-life girl suddenly descends into a world where dapper rabbits run about and cookies make her grow larger and smaller with each bite, could it be anything but terrifying? Švankmajer explores this concept with a morbid curiosity, delightfully showing the horrific aspects of Alice’s adventures without ever resorting to forced, heavy-handed horror tropes. Instead of leaning into the delightful absurdity of Alice's journey, the film indulges in the logical terror of the story. If the main plot of Carroll’s original Alice remains generally intact, though, his charm and wit is stripped away, leaving behind the weird surrealist core underneath.Īlice basks in these strange, twisted occurrences. Most of the same beats are still there: the White Rabbit, neurotic, rushes about in fear of being late the Mad Hatter and the March Hare speak nonsense at a tea party the Queen of Hearts goes on a decapitating rampage. Fields as an unintentionally demented Humpty Dumpty in the 1933 film is impossible to forget), 1988’s Alice takes the prize for the most unsettling adaptation to date.Ĭrafted like a living nightmare, Alice takes the bones of the original stories without altering them significantly. Though the earliest adaptations of Carroll’s stories are cursed with an eeriness that stems mostly from archaic sets, costume designs, and filmic technology ( W.C. Because of its inherent silliness, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is well-fitted for the kind of playful nature found in the 1951 animated version, Tim Burton’s adaptation, and most of the other interpretations. In his stories, Carroll plays with absurdity and nonsense which exist in intentional contrast to the meticulous logic that pervades much of his work. They’re whimsical, timeless, and rich with imagination. That Carroll’s Alice books have been so frequently adapted to the screen is unsurprising. Fox directed by David Lynch- Alice is a film so unapologetically faithful to its unique vision that few studios would dare to make it today. Compared to the dreamlike wonder of Disney’s 1951 animated Alice in Wonderland, the Johnny Depp-starring, Tim Burton-helmed spectacle from 2010, and most other adaptations of Carroll’s timeless tale, Alice is a terrifying fever dream that’ll leave viewers with an unshakable chill. Out of household objects, taxidermy animals, a live-action actress, and a whole attic’s worth of morose props, Jan Švankmajer’s surrealist film takes the viewer into a disturbing wonderland that’s sure to be both familiar and uncomfortably bizarre. That " perhaps," so casually spoken by Alice, is not to be ignored: the following 80-or-so minutes are as odd and unsettling as one could possibly expect from such a movie. perhaps.” So mutters Alice ( Kristýna Kohoutová) during the opening credits of the 1988 Czech stop-motion film Alice, a film that makes a living nightmare out of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. “Now you will see a film made for children.
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