I’ve not read the original Alice in Wonderland, nor do I remember watching the usual Disney version, and thus cannot really speak to the merit of this film as an adaptation, but I know the basic story well enough that I’m sure we’ll get along just fine.
To grasp the setting of Jan Svankmajer’s Alice, first picture a child’s cartoon movie. Picture the randomness, the unexplained happenings, and the surrealism. Picture the impermanent deaths, the comical damage, and the bizarre character designs.
Now act it out in a decaying building with taxidermic horrors of the type usually found in dingy Victorian wunderkammers.
You now have a basic idea.
As I watch this film for the third or fourth time, two words come to mind: Nightmare Fuel. The environment is laced with macabre little elements, totally unnecessary to the plot but adding a thick layer of creeping sensation.
The colours are dull, muted and dirty, and the sets are always slightly claustrophobic, even when Alice has shrunk to doll-size.
Alice herself, I must add, is a girl of very stout heart indeed. Played by the adorable Kristýna Kohoutová,
she traverses this world of endless writing desks, jarred thumbtacks, and cobbled-together monsters with unflappable calm and curiosity.
The house in which the entirety of this story takes place is a veritable maze, with doors and windows that seem to go only in circles, and brief glimpses of grass and open air which only give way again to the electrically-lit confines.
With no musical soundtrack at all, Neco z Alenky is a tale told almost entirely with visuals, and what visuals they are. A constant bombardment of fever-dream madness, utterly hypnotizing in the purity of its strangeness. The story really starts when, in Alice’s room, the stuffed display of a rabbit wrenches itself loose from its glass case and begins its laments about lateness.
Then it runs across a field that wasn’t there before and vanishes into a desk drawer. Then Alice finds it eating sawdust in an effort to replace that which has fallen from the gash in its belly.
Then Alice falls through the ‘rabbit hole’ (which is here depicted as a long, dark lift, surrounded by shelves of grim curiosities)
and winds up in the instantly recognizable scene where she shrinks to fit through a door (by drinking a bottle of ink, in this case),
finds the key out of her reach, and eats a biscuit to grow larger than before only to find that she can’t get through the door. The room fills with her tears,
and they rush in a small flood into the next room when she finally gets the door open. Here she wages a battle against the Rabbit and its entourage of bizarre creatures,
and they eventually corner her and drag her off to another strange cabinet. Then she opens the various jars and tins, finding monsters, cockroaches, and a living side of beef.
Then there is a room filled with socks. The caterpillar is a disturbing sock-creature with dentures and glass eyes.
Her socks try to escape. Alice finds a baby, which is also a pig. She goes to the tea party with a wooden-puppet Hatter and a decaying child’s toy March Hare.
She plays croquet with the Queen of Hearts
using flamingoes that turn into chickens to hit pincushions that turn into hedgehogs. She goes to trial for eating biscuits and gets in trouble for not reading her script right. Then she wakes up, apparently back in reality, only to find that the Rabbit’s glass case is shattered, and the Rabbit itself absent. With a clunky pair of scissors in hand, she narrates that the Rabbit is late, as usual, and: “…I think I’ll cut his head off.”
And, fin.
That’s it. I have no idea how the original story ended, but this was just the right combination of abruptness and ominous to bring a silly grin to my face.
As I stated in the beginning, I’m not really an authority on Alice in Wonderland in itself. I have, however, had the misfortune of being on the receiving end of many an attempt to make the classic tale ‘mature’. By this, we usually mean ‘with sex in it’. My opinions on this definition of maturity could fill an essay, and I will spare you them, but to all those who crave a fairy tale ‘for adults’ without that nonsense, I would recommend this. It is subtle and nuanced without resorting to the usual tropes of ‘edginess’, and I find it to be a wellspring of artistic inspiration. On the technical side of things, the stop-motion animation really deserves a note of its own for sheer beauty. I don’t know how long it took for this film to be made, but it was worth every minute. The eerie, shaking motion of the animated figures evokes a feeling of rusted machinery and clockwork toys, and they mesh perfectly with their surroundings.
If you are to watch this movie, I would encourage you wholeheartedly to find a Czech language version. The one I have is dubbed in English with no option to change, and it makes for a weird disconnect between the movement of the narrator’s lips and the sound. It’s a little frustrating.
In conclusion, this is definitely a film to see at least once, though perhaps not with company and certainly not with small children. You’ll scar them for life.
Spin.
Neco z Alenky is © to Channel Four Films. (I think. This wasn’t specified so well on the case, so feel free to correct me.)
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