Credits

Regie

Jan Svankmajer

Genre

Fantasy, Adventure, Animation

Speelduur

86 minutes

Land

Czechoslovakia

Taal

Czech

Ondertiteling

English

Storyline

Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has seen no shortage of film adaptations. While around forty film versions exist, as well as numerous TV adaptations, the version that Czech stop motion master Jan Svankmajer fashioned in 1988 stands alone in its dark and original take on Carroll’s light-hearted tale. Svankmajer, already a distinguished director of stop motion shorts, envisioned a film version of Alice in Wonderland that combined live-action and stop-motion into a hallucinatory fever dream. As Svankmajer noted later, he felt that earlier film adaptations were too much like fairytales, glossing over the darker subtext in Carroll’s tale of escape from reality into a nonsense world. And who could not see the dark side of a world that features a hookah-smoking caterpillar, an insane tea- party and a queen whose main business seems to be beheadings?

While a loose adaptation, Svankmajer’s little girl Alice strips away the sugar- coating from the character that many of us know from the 1951 Disney film. In Alice, Kristýna Kohoutová plays the role close to Lewis Carroll’s original, mischievous Alice from the novel. Yet, in the context of 1988 socialist Czechoslovakia, rebellious Alice is not just a historical image of resistance against communist conformism but also represents a craving for freedom from socialist stricture.