Customer Reviews

Alice

5 star:		(45)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

This is a film for children. . . sort of, with these ominous words we enter a decaying, claustrophobic wonderland filled with rusty drafting instruments, filthy shards of pottery, lots of sawdust and ageing specimen jars. Watching this movie is like being locked in a closet for a few hours, not exactly fun but impossible to escape. Alice herself undergoes the transformation from a barefoot little girl to a nineteenth century china doll exquisitley animated by the master of stop motion animation as she crawls through desk drawers and grim hallways. the famillar characters of wonderland become rotting museum displays scurrying about like nightmarish clockwork toys. the sound effects add considerably to the eldritch atmosphere - splintering wood, grating metal, and what sounds like some sort of ratchet create a disturbing effect, further reminding us how far from reality we are. this is definitely the best adaptation of Lewis Carrols masterpiece, and the rarest of all commodities - an original voice.

There are only two negatives to this film that I felt were mostly unnecessary elements. One was the frequent edit to a close-up of Alice's, excuse me "Alenka's," tiny mouth and stained yellow teeth saying things like "Said the White Rabbit" or "Said the Queen of Hearts." By the time this monotony reached the double-digits I was getting annoyed. I knew which character said what, and I didn't need a constant reminder. The other negative, and this is up for debate, is that I don't like foreign films that are dubbed in English. Call me crazy, but I prefer subtitles. There is always something lost in the translation. Well, enough of my negativity. There is plenty here worth seeing, and if you are a genuine nut-case for stop-motion filmmaking than you should thoroughly enjoy this movie. This is not a children's film! There are way too many unnerving and nightmarish sequences. In fact, this film feels like a surreal nightmare! There's a slab of meat that squirms into a pot, there are little rat skulls breaking out of egg shells, and my favorite moment of the film comes when Alice is being chased by the White Rabbit and his grotesque friends. Alice slams the door and bars the smaller door at the base. Suddenly, an axe-head bursts through the tiny door repeatedly until it is completely splintered. The axe withdraws and the head of the White Rabbit(a stuffed rabbit with sawdust for entrails) pokes through and he seems to stare at Alice with an evil glare from his glassy white eyes. I expected him to say "Heeeere's Thumper!" That was the creepiest moment for me, but there are others. There are also some wrenching sound effects that add some excellent flavor to the nightmarish proceedings. If it wasn't for the extremely annoying and frequent cutaways to Alice's slimy mouth I may have given this film a higher rating. That, and she has a gross habit of puting everything she finds into her mouth. One thing she tries is a key she finds inside a sardine tin filled with oil. Instead of wiping the key clean on her dress she gives it one good, long slurp. Yuck! Even she grimaced, much to my delight. "Overall, this is a good movie with plenty of jarring scenes and dream-like sequences that are haunting me to this day," said the Amazon.com reviewer. There is also a short stop-motion film on this DVD that is "definitely" not for children, but it does have some humorous moments. Take it easy.

Czech animator Svankmajer's "Alice" is an outlandish work of genius. It is based on Lewis Carroll's classic "Alice in Wonderland" but this is definitely the filmmaker's own take on things, and a surreal take it is. Alice (a live girl) is half asleep in a lonely attic when a stuffed rabbit (stop-motion animation) in a glass case pulls up his nailed-down feet, rips a pocket watch out of his own sawdust stuffing, and we're off on an eerie adventure. Much of the film is very quiet; there is no background music, just superb, tactile sound effects that help us appreciate every loving, weird detail that comes along. Of these there are many; Svankmajer, like Carroll, has the true surrealist's eye for simple images that are extremely powerful and memorable, but for reasons our conscious mind can't possibly explain. Occasionally Alice herself speaks any necessary dialogue, as if narrating her own dream; we often cut to a shot of her lips moving and completely unrelated words come out in English with a delightful British accent. (Some reviewers below have found this apparent disconnect between the moving lips and the English speech annoying but I found it strangely magical, and very much intentional on the filmmaker's part.) The detailed puppetry amid these claustrophobic indoor diorama sets is wonderfully done. A few bits of this film might freak out little kids, but they will probably be bewildered anyway. Instead, adults who appreciate carefully done, brilliant, undigital whimsy will hopefully enjoy this little jewel as much as I did; I first watched with intrigued delight, and every few years I like to watch it again.

This disk contains two features. "Darkness, Light, Darkness" is a claymation short, and very odd. The main feature, "Alice", combines live action with stop-animation and is even more peculiar. I like both, even though I'm not wholly sure what to make of either.

DLD is all staged in a small room. A person arrives, over the course of the piece, one body part at a time. A hand comes first, then eyes, another hand, the senses, body, and (very late) brain. The whole person is built up from the parts as they arrive and is finally completed - within the room, trapped by doors and windows much too small to allow it to escape.

"Alice" is the most memorable Alice in Wonderland that I've seen. It features only one living actor. She's a young girl, maybe eight years old - a brilliant piece of casting and brilliant in simply being herself. She wears a pretty pink dress and a serious expression throughout. She also wears her smudges and snarls unselfconciously, tends to throw stones, and never shies from the violence implicit in Lewis Carroll's original story.

Svankmajer wanders back and forth across Carroll's story, intersecting at many points. Whether inside Carroll's script or out, Svankmajer aways presents his own vision, one that tends towards the macabre. The White Rabbit is a taxidermy specimen, often leaking sawdust and often licking it back up again. Instead of a mirror, Alice walks through a drawer in a drafting table - the artist's "mirror" on his world - and walks through others at many transitions.

Maybe half the movie is stop-motion animation, but the distinctions are not alway clear. Like Harryhausen, Svankmajer often combines model animation with the real girl. Going beyond Harryhausen, he uses the girl as animation material - the cook-fire on her head being the clearest example. The animation itself tends to be jerky, but very expressive. The caterpillar, for example, is a sock-puppet on a sewing form. When his part is over, he shuts his heyes and goes to sleep. The difference, though, is that his eyes are shut for him, sewn shut by darning needles.

There is remarkably little use of voice, except for a few points where the girl acts as a puppet-like narrator. Only the trial near the end uses much conversation, and that owes more to Kafka ("Say what you're supposed to say," said The King) than to Carroll.

It's good. Strange, but very good.

//wiredweird

This is doubtlessly the most bizarre film I have ever seen. Since it is a version of ALICE, that's okay. It holds a sort of hallucinatory shadow over the story from which it was inspired: it is a frightening look into the very desolation that comes with age. Alice herself is lost in Wonderland, perhaps an embodiment of the corruption and decay that follows the subversion of childhood. The characters of the book have been reduced to dead, mindless things here: the White Rabbit is a taxidermist's expirament; the Mad Hatter is a marionette; the March Hare is a stuffed animal. These characters, void of life and thought, seem to represent the dull world of adulthood, where the repetitive events of every day are hammered out endlessly, and seen without the color or whimsy they hold when seen through the eyes of a child. The movie is doubtlessly symbolic of many things, however they are so cryptically presented that I cannot figure any of them out for myself. The movie itself is not fun to watch, it is rather tedious, in fact: but it holds a subconscious power over the viewer, he sees with astonished eyes Alice moving through the doorways and drawerways of the decaying realm. The viewer becomes part of a different sphere of consciousness: he lingers with Alice in a perpetual dream-state, or, a nightmare from which he cannot awake, until the last scant bit of dilogue is recited, and the final credits roll. Svankmajere (or however you spell it) has a fine taste for the macabre, and by moving as far from Carroll's story as possible, he does it ironic justice. By moulding the plot to form his own tightly-knit fantasy, he does not sabotage the feel of the book, but intensifies it. For this he deserves praise. With Alice we feel every bit of menace and curiosity, a trait rarely found in films. This one touches profoundly and unexplainably with the child inside us, and for the lapse of its running time we become part of another world, one which we are anxious to escape while we linger in it, but feel obsessively drawn back to after the return to our conscious states.

As an Alice fanatic I had been looking forward to Jan Svankmajer's film, but I am suspicious it will eventually give me nightmares. I also am a lover of the macabre and surreal, so perhaps I was just not in the right frame of mind for this sort of thing... We have Alice, as her true size played by a real life little girl, who then morphs into a porcelain doll when she shrinks. There is something basely terrifying about the blank china doll, and I really felt like locking it in a closet whenever it was onscreen. The White Rabbit, a dead stuffed sawdust-leaking rabbit with big fake eyes and hideous teeth is even more horrific! The other classic characters, all brought to life by stop-art animation, are almost equally repulsive. Wonderland itself isn't anything like it is in the book or film adaptations, Disney especially. No fantasy cottages or magical gardens here. It's as if the new setting alternated between the basement of an Old World morgue and a dilapidated Old World tenement, through which Alice wanders room to room. One unsettling aspect of the film is its lack of background noise. Apart from it's piercing sound effects there is absolutely no music and no score, only intensifying the nightmarish landscape. Another oddity is the way Alice tells the story. The bits of dialogue, though brief, are constantly & bothersome-ly punctuated by a girl's voice finishing off the speech with: "Said the White Rabbit," or "Said Alice to herself." These punctuations are shot as full close-ups of Alice's mouth, and since the original Czechoslovakian dialogue has been dubbed over with English it has a rather irritating effect... Look out for the disturbing scene where the White Rabbit and Co. capture Alice and throw her in a dark pantry full of freakish sundries! This film is definately not for children--I can't say this any other way! Imagine Sesame Street if all the Muppets were little corpses several weeks dead, rotting & grossly skeletal! I still rate this movie fairly high, despite my adversion to it, as I am guessing this was Svankmajer's ultimate intention, and it does all come down to individual preference and mood. Maybe rent this one first or borrow a friend's copy before putting out the money. I can't see myself ever watching "Alice" on a regular basis. I guess I'll save her for Halloweentime or a dark and stormy evening when frightening dreams are called for. If you feel like visiting a bleak imaginary world then may I recommend "Nightmare Before Christmas," where the characters are much more on the adorable side...

An excellant movie for the connesiuer of the bizzare. The movie does have some down sides I'm afraid. The narration by Alice does begin to get a bit tedious by the middle of the movie. The stop motion photography is excellant. Well worth it.Its dark under currents give the film a other worldly fever dream quality. No soundtrack though. Disturbing sound effects. Yesssss. A surrealist universe of dreams and nightmares.

Truly eerie and surreal verison of the Lewis Carroll story, has(at the beginning) Alice sitting in her playroom. In there, she sees a white rabbit break out of his cage and leap into an adjoining desert-like area where a table with a drawer stands up ahead. She then climbs into it and falls into a disturbing world where household items become the characters of Wonderland, and a deck of cards becomes the Wonderland castle. Jan Svankmajer's stop-animation treatment makes this film a truly original experience, giving it a disturbing and eerie feel. The lighting and photography also add to the mysterious atmosphere of this 85-minute film. Fans of other film versions might not be happy about the fact that this film changes quite a bit of the story, but I found that to be little of the problem. I reduced the rating to this film because I thought that ALICE would be a little more for kids, but some parents may want to view this before letting their kids watch it. Highly original, but somewhat disturbing film version of Alice. Quite good.

The influence of Jan Svankmajer's 1988 ALICE on the art and film and deisgn of the 1990s and beyond is enormous: you can see it almost evidently in the films of the Brothers Quay and David Fincher as well as in every beautifully designed magazine you open today. Svankmajer took the Lewis Carroll story and transposed it to a world which seems totalitarian in nature, and beautifully shabby and eroded in look, where everything is chappied and falling to pieces. The white rabbit is a terrifying taxidermic model, with huge teeth and glass eyes; it pulls itself from its mounting pins and bleeds sawdust when opened. The fall down the rabbit hole is a dark descent by elevator down through what seems to be a beautifully decrepit storage warehouse: the small animals Alice encounters are skull-headed toys.

All this is beautiful, and creates a stunningly original aesthetic. It's also sometimes a bit creepy, and (worse) at times exceptionally tedious. (You think if you get one more extreme close-up of Alice's lips telling the tale you'll scream.) It's something to pore over shot by shot or sequence by sequence, but it's not particularly entertaining by any means. But it is something that still deserves to be seen again and again.

I thought the film was the most original interpretation of Caroll's Alice in Wonderland. While all the other book to film and even American McGee's Alice were rather flightly, with characters that are completely conjured up (drawn or animated) Svankmajer's Alice had characters and objects that feel real. They are toys, yes, but because you know they exist on our plane, our dimention in 3d form (although they certainly behave nothing like how they do in the film) the entire story takes on a different level of reality and possibility.

The entire movie has a very edgy reality-fantasy feel, and what the director has done to the creatures in Caroll's universe is far too original. And it's alot of fun if you have read the book and remember the Disney animated film from years back. Most of the important elements are there, but given a completely different feel you will keep on watching just to find out what Svankmajer has re-worked.

It is a little draggy though, and while I will say it is nothing like you would have ever watched before, I don't think it's worth the price of $26. You will be missing something if you don't watch it, but yet, it's not all that enjoyable. Mostly because by things are a little draggy here and there, mostly to no fault of the Directors I would suppose, but rather because feature length films have to be of a certain time length.