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The first feature length film by Czech director Jan Švankmajer (he had built his career on short films before this), Alice, or Něco z Alenky as it’s known in the original tongue, tells the story that most of you are probably familiar with. Alice, a young girl wrapped up in the duties a young girl is required of her, playing with dolls and schoolwork, one day comes a talking white rabbit with a fancy wardrobe and an obsession with punctuality. An intensely curious child, Alice decides to chase after the rabbit, and ends up in Wonderland, a bizarre world populated by even more bizarre residents. Determined to find that white rabbit, Alice goes on an absurd journey through this nonsense country, interacting with all manor of unbelievable creature. Will she ever find the White Rabbit? Will she ever find her way home again? Only time will tell, and there seems to be a shortage of that in Wonderland.
However, things were a little different when Jan decided to get behind the camera. You see he wasn’t a fan of the Alice adaptations that had been released up to then, believing they had made Wonderland come off as too much of a fairy tale. To him Lewis Carroll’s book was more like an amoral dream, and so that’s the kind of movie he decided to make. An intensely surreal film, where an almost entirely mute Alice (almost all dialogue is given to us by a narrator of sorts, Camilla Power in this case) travels about a nonsense world that’s made up of locations in or around her home, interacting with things that are made up of the things in her home. The White Rabbit’s home is a hutch surrounded by building blocks for example. It seems rather low-key compared to elaborate fantasy worlds of Disney and the like, but I actually really appreciate the idea. For children like Alice their home is their entire world, so it makes sense that their unconscious minds would reflect that.
That being said, apparently when Jan decided he wasn’t going to be doing a fairy tale interpretation of ‘Adventures in Wonderland’, that meant he had to go a complete 180 degrees and make it a total nightmare instead. Alice no longer lives in a normal house anymore, but instead some kind of Silent Hill-style post-industrial slum with nothing but dead bugs and jars of various things to keep her company. The White Rabbit is some kind of taxidermy monstrosity with bulging glass eyes and an open chest cavity where sawdust continually pours out, and he’s probably one of the lesser horrific ones. The film also uses extensive stop-motion animation, so when that living sock crawls up out of the floor and absorbs the glass eyes and dentures into itself to form a face, it’s looks as real as they can make it. Despite being a children’s book written specifically for a child, I cannot fathom this being a movie that you’d actually want your child to watch. Maybe kids in the Czech Republic have a better tolerance for this sort of stuff, but I think kid me would have gained two or three mental scars from this movie easy. If you ever wondered what Puppet Master would be like if it was actually scary, here it is.
Nightmare fuel aside, I’d say my biggest issue with Alice is one of pacing. Now I know that this is meant to be a ‘dream’, which means lots of lingering shots on weird stuff, but with this movie it feels like every scene lingers on a minute or two longer than it probably should. The scene where Alice takes the shrinking drink and the growing tarts for example, feels like it takes up half the film, and the movie had barely started by that point. Which wouldn’t be a problem, necessarily, but when your movie is centered around a child entering and leavings rooms, constantly returning to the same bureau gag, and generally not doing much of anything in particular, you start to become overwhelmingly aware of the passage of time.
The fact that this is a loose adaptation also becomes quite clear when you notice how sparse Wonderland has become. Alice manages to capture a couple of the set pieces from the novel, the room with the tiny door, the Caterpillar, the Mad Tea Party, even the baby that turns into a pig, but a lot of the things that would otherwise might seem standard going for a Wonderland movie are missing. There’s no Cheshire Cat for instance, a character that’s become as popular as Alice herself in the years since the novel’s release, nor will you find the Dodo, the Mock Turtle, the Duchess (weird to have the baby but not the baby’s mother) and many others. I’m sure it comes down to issues of time and budget, animating a dozen more characters would probably add up, but it does serve to make Wonderland seem a tad less wondrous, and the rampant mildew infestation on every wall in the film had already taken care of that within the first couple of minutes.
To me, the appeal of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is that it is a story about a very proper, very bright girl who is placed into a world that’s like a funhouse mirror version of her own, where everything she knows is wrong and everything wrong is right. Jan Švankmajer’s Alice certainly captures the illogic of Carroll’s world visually but that satirical aspect, the Victorian-era Stranger in a Strange Land is missing, and so too the main point of interest of the story in my opinion. Who is Alice in this film? What are her interests, what is her motivation, beyond the obsession with the White Rabbit? You can’t really tell, and if that’s the case then why do I care about her or what she’s doing? Does this movie work without the audience already knowing the Wonderland stories and being able to fill in the blanks? I dunno.
While I wouldn’t claim it’s the definitive adaptation, if such a thing even exists, from a visual standpoint Alice earns a recommendation. It’s not a movie I’d pick up for family movie night, but considering the popularity of ‘dark’ versions of otherwise benign children’s stories I think finding a willing audience wouldn’t be all that difficult. Whether it’s for Halloween or a loved one’s Un-birthday, Alice just might be the film for you. Try it out, or you might end up losing your head.
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