Alice

Year: 1988
Country: Czechoslovakia
Director: Jan Svankmajer
Watched through: library VHS
Also known as: Neco z Alenky

The scenario: A very bored Alice falls asleep in her room and then follows the elusive White Rabbit through a desk drawer into a sinister, surreal dream land.

First impressions: This is one of the innumerable film versions of Lewis Carroll’s famous book. So, my first impression was, why bother? This story has been done almost as many times as Cinderella and Peter Pan; what’s different about this version? Well, the atmosphere is certainly different. The whimsy of the original is replaced here with a vague sense of dread, and the grotesque aspects of the dream land are played up in every scene. While it seems like a creative approach to a familiar story, the film itself is actually very dull. I’m aware that this film has a large cult following, but I don’t see anything likeable in it. Also, though it claims to be for children, any kid who watched it would probably alternate between being bored and being grossed out.

Plot and story: While it would seem obvious that this film has a story, since it is, after all, based on a book, it can’t hold a narrative thread to save its life. Alice enters the dream world while chasing the White Rabbit, and what follows is a series of long, dull, and ultimately pointless scenes showing how she navigates the dream world (all white fruitlessly pleading for the Rabbit to wait for her). The scenes have little to no bearing on each other, and could probably be re-arranged in any order without affecting the conclusion. I don’t know how faithful the plot is to the book, and I don’t care. When it comes down to it, there is no suspense, no meaningful connections between the individual scenes, and no real narrative. The result is a ridiculously dull movie that feels like twice its 85 minute running time. 4/20

Characters: What characters? Sure, we have our protagonist and the bizarre inhabitants of the dream world, but none of them come close to having anything resembling character development, or even a personality. Alice is bored and rather impetuous, but not much else. The White Rabbit frets a lot and makes demands, but has no characterization beyond this. The rest of the puppet cast is even flatter. As a side note, why does Alice start out wanting to follow the Rabbit, then trying to kill him, then wanting to follow him again? It makes no sense. 3/20

Voices: I actually have to talk about this one in the singular: there’s only one voice. Now, this film is originally in Czech, and I watched it in English. This wouldn’t seem like a problem but for the fact that part of the film (and all of the dialogue) is live-action. The bottom line about dubbing voices onto live-action film is, it doesn’t work. There’s very little talking, but all of the dialogue, no matter who it’s attributed to, is spoken by Alice, in uncomfortable close-ups of her lips. Having Alice say, “oh my, said that White Rabbit” gets tiresome very quickly, and the English-speaking actress isn’t that good. 1/20

Music: There isn’t any, oddly enough. n/a

Visuals: One might assume that this is the real reason to see this film, as macabre stop-motion always seems to find an audience. However, neither the designs nor the physical animation are anything to write home about. Some of the puppets are very creative in appearance, but most of them are pretty damn ugly. The backgrounds and settings are intentionally gross and sinister, but none of them are terribly interesting. The frame-by-frame animation is extremely jerky and looks astoundingly amateur in places. Furthermore, the combination of live-action and stop-motion doesn’t work at all. The transitions between the two are glaringly obvious, and the difference in frame rates only makes the animated parts look worse. I can’t imagine that this was anything but a labor of love for the creators, but the film seems somehow unfinished, and since the visuals can’t make up for the film’s other shortcomings, I have to recommend that you skip this one. 7/20

Overall grade: 15/80 = about 19/100 (F)