Alice

Czech animation legend Jan Svankmajer mixes animation and live action to create a peculiar world for his 1988 adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, here re-imagined as a creepy dream. Young Alice (played by Kristýna Kohoutov, but spoken by English actress Camilla Power) watches a stuffed rabbit come to life in her playroom and then follows the bunny through a magical drawer into a strange world that resembles a 19th-century toy store (with a few specimens from a natural history museum thrown in). Svankmajer retains the familiar story elements but adds bizarre imagery, brought to herky-jerky life using his spasmodic style of stop-motion animation (the caterpillar becomes a sock puppet with dentures, while other crazy creatures materialize as weird skull-headed beings that bleed sawdust). Throughout, Svankmajer returns to close-ups of Alice's lips telling the story, reminding us that this is a tale being told. In the best surrealist tradition Svankmajer employs familiar objects in unfamiliar ways, giving a fantasy quality to the banal (and the not so banal) while tipping the dream logic onto the edge of nightmare. While the imagery remains more unsettling than genuinely disturbing, this is not a film meant for little kids. However, older children, adults, and animation buffs will appreciate Svankmajer's sly visual wit and unusual animation style. Remastered for its Blu-ray debut, this is recommended. (S. Axmaker)