Alice (1988)

Original title: Neco z Alenky

After a series of distinguished short films mixing animation and live action stretching back to 1964’s Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara/The Last Trick of Mr Schwarcewallde and Mr Edgar, Czech animator Jan Svankmajer made the transition to feature films with Alice, a film that retained all the surreal charm and nightmarish weirdness that had been the hallmark of his earlier works. There had often been a tendency for adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s childhood favourite Alice in Wonderland (1865) to either become sugar-coated animations or bloated, cameo-heavy affairs full of unlikely thesps who have been crow-barred in to play the many exotic creatures and characters that Alice meets on her travels. Svankmajer was having none of that – the human cast is stripped down to just Alice herself (winningly played by 10-year-old Kristýna Kohoutová, sometimes “doubled” by an animated doll) and a grotesque menagerie of creatures cobbled together from skeletons, scraps of material and any other detritus Svankmajer had to hand.

Svankmajer only uses the very basic plot of the book and takes it off into very different territory. Alice falls asleep and finds herself in a an almost post-apocalyptic landscape, a single ramshackle room sitting in a seemingly featureless wasteland. A stuffed white rabbit comes to life, tearing itself painfully off the bails that hold it in place and, spewing sawdust from a gash in its stomach, flees to a desk sitting incongruously in the wastes and disappears into a drawer. The curious and fearless Alice follows, finding herself in a Wonderland unlike any we’d seen before, or indeed since. A series of connected rooms, this Wonderland is a dank, miserable subterranean nightmare full of food laced with potentially lethal sharp objects, bizarre, partly mechanical creatures that are constantly harassing Alice and everyday objects that turn into traps for unwary children.

“Now you will see a film made for children,” intones Alice at the start (the English dub is provided by an uncredited Camilla Power, an actress later familiar to British television viewers through a series of appearances in popular drama like Emmerdale, The Grand, Waterloo Road et al). “Perhaps…” Make no bones about it, this is definitely not a film for children – it’s a macabre blend of atmospheric live-action eeriness and Svankmajer’s distinctive and often disturbing style of stop-motion animation. Svankmajer had already referenced Carroll in his short film Zvahlav aneb Saticky Slameného Huberta/Jabberwocky (1971) and Do pivnice/Down to the Cellar (1983) had seen him rehearse some of the concerns that would inform Alice but what he created in his feature debut is unique – Alice in Wonderland always had a dark undercurrent but it had never looked as dark or disturbing as it does here. The rabbit in particular is terrifying, with its glassy eyes, menacing teeth and sawdust-spewing wounds – truly the stuff of any leporiphobics worst nightmare.

As well as the unforgettable visuals, Alice is distinguished by its extraordinary sound design, created by Robert Jansa and Ivo Spalj. There’s no music, just a hair-raising soundscape of exaggerated rumbles, clicks, bangs, babies crying and animals mewling. Every sound is heightened to maximum its impact and the cumulative effect is as unsettling as cinema sound can get – the only comparable use of the soundtrack to unsettle the audience is to be found in the films of that other master of modern screen surrealism, David Lynch.

Carroll purists will probably be horrified with what Svankmajer has doe to the source novel. There are no Cheshire Cats here, no dodos, dormice, gryphons or mock turtles. We keep the Mad Hatter and his sparring partner the march hare for a wonderfully funny interlude involving tea, cutlery and the hare’s eye constantly falling out but Svankmajer makes sweeping changes to the story. It’s even more episodic than the book, each set-piece taking place in a different room in Wonderland, culminating in the ridiculous encounter with the Red Queen (a talking playing card) during which the director seems to acknowledge that he’s wrought a lot of changes that will likely upset many sticklers for Carroll’s exact words – “Stick to the text” admonishes the King of Hearts when Alice tries to wander away from the “confession” written for her at her trial. But Svankmajer was never that concerned with presenting a faithful adaptation. The film’s original Czech title, Neco z Alenky translates as “Something from Alice” – it was only ever meant to be an impression of the story and never a straight adaptation – not that Svankmajer could ever have made a straight adaptation of anything even if he tried.

As in the book, Alice is a tough little girl, completely unafraid of the strange things that befall her. She’s beset by hideous creatures at every turn but gives as good as she gets and is certainly no shrinking violet when it comes to meting out violence towards her tormentors. The things that happen to her would have had any normal child screaming with terror but this Alice is unphased by the strangeness. Even in one of her most memorably horrible moments – attacked by skeletal animals and forced into a vat of milk that solidifies around her, a moment as unsettling as anything in any horror film – she remains stoic, almost wearily resigned to the madness around her. Kristýna Kohoutová is fantastic in the role. It’s not entirely clear what became of her – although she appears not have made any more films and actress of the same name and of the right age appears to still be performing in the theatre in Czechoslovakia.

You’ll have to go a very long way to a version of Alice in Wonderland as wild, inventive and as terrifying as Svankmajer’s It’s a film of escalating weirdness – every time you think it can’t get any crazier, the director unleashes another barrage of insanity so that by the final act the appearance of frogs and fishes as royal footmen serving a mad family of playing cards seems like the most natural thing in the world. The final image – Alice waking, noting that the stuffed rabbit is still missing from its glass tank, snapping a huge pair of scissors and telling herself “He’s late, as usual. I think I’ll cut his head off” suggests that the nightmare isn’t quite yet over and that Alice has been emotionally damaged by her experiences. It’s a bleak ending to a bleak film but perfectly in keeping with the film’s attempt to reposition Alice in Wonderland as a horror story.

Svankmajer has sporadically continued to make feature films, including the brilliant Faust (1994), Spiklenci slasti/Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), Otesánek/Little Otik (2000), Sílení/Lunacy (2005), Prezít svuj zivot (teorie a praxe)/Surviving Life (2010) and Hmyz/Insect (2018) and all of them are varying degrees of genius. But Alice is the real gem in his filmography, a culmination of the themes, preoccupations and techniques he’d developed over the course of his short films and the perfect showcase for his unique view of the world. Lewis Carroll fans will drown in a pool of their own tears at the wholesale changes made to the story but for those looking for a film that retains the spirit of Alice in Wonderland while exposing its dark beating heart will instantly fall for its decidedly offbeat charms.