Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28893 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-04-11
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Animated, Color, DVD, Live, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 91 minutes

Amazon.com essential video
This adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland mixes animation and live action to create a dreamlike world, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's simply a kid's film. Young Alice (Kristyna Kohoutová, spoken by Camilla Power) watches a stuffed and mounted rabbit come to life in her playroom and follows it through a magical drawer into a strange world that resembles a 19th-century toy store come to life, with a few specimens from a natural history museum thrown in. Czech animator Jan Svankmajer retains the familiar story elements but tweaks them with bizarre imagery brought to herky-jerky life with his spasmodic style of stop-motion animation. The caterpillar becomes a sock puppet with dentures, while other crazy creatures materialize as creepy skull-headed beings that bleed sawdust. Throughout the tale Svankmajer returns to punctuating close-ups of Alice's lips telling the story, just to remind us that this is a tale told. In the best surrealist tradition Svankmajer uses familiar objects in unfamiliar ways, giving a fantasy quality to the banal (and the not so banal) while tipping the dream logic to the edge of nightmare. While the imagery remains more unsettling than genuinely disturbing, younger children will certainly be happier with Disney's brightly colored animated classic Alice in Wonderland. Older children and adults will better appreciate Svankmajer's sly visual wit and unusual animation style. --Sean Axmaker

Review
Svankmajer's film explores Alice in Wonderland's dark undercurrents: it unearths the fears that animate dreams and nightmares. --New York Times

Customer Reviews

A film for children. . . sort of
This is a film for children. . . sort of, with these ominous words we enter a decaying, claustrophobic wonderland filled with rusty drafting instruments, filthy shards of pottery, lots of sawdust and ageing specimen jars. Watching this movie is like being locked in a closet for a few hours, not exactly fun but impossible to escape. Alice herself undergoes the transformation from a barefoot little girl to a nineteenth century china doll exquisitley animated by the master of stop motion animation as she crawls through desk drawers and grim hallways. the famillar characters of wonderland become rotting museum displays scurrying about like nightmarish clockwork toys. the sound effects add considerably to the eldritch atmosphere - splintering wood, grating metal, and what sounds like some sort of ratchet create a disturbing effect, further reminding us how far from reality we are. this is definitely the best adaptation of Lewis Carrols masterpiece, and the rarest of all commodities - an original voice.

"Said the Queen of Hearts"
There are only two negatives to this film that I felt were mostly unnecessary elements. One was the frequent edit to a close-up of Alice's, excuse me "Alenka's," tiny mouth and stained yellow teeth saying things like "Said the White Rabbit" or "Said the Queen of Hearts." By the time this monotony reached the double-digits I was getting annoyed. I knew which character said what, and I didn't need a constant reminder. The other negative, and this is up for debate, is that I don't like foreign films that are dubbed in English. Call me crazy, but I prefer subtitles. There is always something lost in the translation. Well, enough of my negativity. There is plenty here worth seeing, and if you are a genuine nut-case for stop-motion filmmaking than you should thoroughly enjoy this movie. This is not a children's film! There are way too many unnerving and nightmarish sequences. In fact, this film feels like a surreal nightmare! There's a slab of meat that squirms into a pot, there are little rat skulls breaking out of egg shells, and my favorite moment of the film comes when Alice is being chased by the White Rabbit and his grotesque friends. Alice slams the door and bars the smaller door at the base. Suddenly, an axe-head bursts through the tiny door repeatedly until it is completely splintered. The axe withdraws and the head of the White Rabbit(a stuffed rabbit with sawdust for entrails) pokes through and he seems to stare at Alice with an evil glare from his glassy white eyes. I expected him to say "Heeeere's Thumper!" That was the creepiest moment for me, but there are others. There are also some wrenching sound effects that add some excellent flavor to the nightmarish proceedings. If it wasn't for the extremely annoying and frequent cutaways to Alice's slimy mouth I may have given this film a higher rating. That, and she has a gross habit of puting everything she finds into her mouth. One thing she tries is a key she finds inside a sardine tin filled with oil. Instead of wiping the key clean on her dress she gives it one good, long slurp. Yuck! Even she grimaced, much to my delight. "Overall, this is a good movie with plenty of jarring scenes and dream-like sequences that are haunting me to this day," said the Amazon.com reviewer. There is also a short stop-motion film on this DVD that is "definitely" not for children, but it does have some humorous moments. Take it easy.

Labor of Love
Czech animator Svankmajer's "Alice" is an outlandish work of genius. It is based on Lewis Carroll's classic "Alice in Wonderland" but this is definitely the filmmaker's own take on things, and a surreal take it is. Alice (a live girl) is half asleep in a lonely attic when a stuffed rabbit (stop-motion animation) in a glass case pulls up his nailed-down feet, rips a pocket watch out of his own sawdust stuffing, and we're off on an eerie adventure. Much of the film is very quiet; there is no background music, just superb, tactile sound effects that help us appreciate every loving, weird detail that comes along. Of these there are many; Svankmajer, like Carroll, has the true surrealist's eye for simple images that are extremely powerful and memorable, but for reasons our conscious mind can't possibly explain. Occasionally Alice herself speaks any necessary dialogue, as if narrating her own dream; we often cut to a shot of her lips moving and completely unrelated words come out in English with a delightful British accent. (Some reviewers below have found this apparent disconnect between the moving lips and the English speech annoying but I found it strangely magical, and very much intentional on the filmmaker's part.) The detailed puppetry amid these claustrophobic indoor diorama sets is wonderfully done. A few bits of this film might freak out little kids, but they will probably be bewildered anyway. Instead, adults who appreciate carefully done, brilliant, undigital whimsy will hopefully enjoy this little jewel as much as I did; I first watched with intrigued delight, and every few years I like to watch it again.