Alice (1988): B+

There’s a reason that Jan Svankmajer’s reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s seminal children’s fable is titled simply Alice – namely, because the bizarre, unsettling and occasionally terrifying world that his pint-sized heroine (Kristyna Kohoutova) magically enters is anything but a delightful wonderland. Melding live-action with stop-motion animation, Svankmajer remains largely faithful to his source material’s narrative arc while bestowing it with a bustling undercurrent of psycho-sexual menace derived from phallic/penetration imagery (slithering sock puppet caterpillars, a fat, meaty frog’s tongue) and grotesque, violent visuals (the white rabbit bleeding sawdust and then repeatedly licking it off his watch, scissor beheadings, the March Hare moving about in a rickety wheelchair). The director’s synthesis of the authentic and the artificial (replete with frighteningly creaking, clanging sound effects) – as well as his refusal to bookend the fantastical action with comforting visions of the waking world – allows Alice to tap into the element of nightmarish dread that’s always colored the classic kid’s story, and his sparse use of English narration (delivered via fetishistic, out-of-sync close-ups of Kohoutova’s mouth) highlights the power of the spoken word while also contributing to the overriding air of unreality. Eerily evocative and disturbingly potent, Svankmajer’s surrealist adaptation is a welcome antidote to the cute and cuddly Disneyfication of Carroll’s iconic tale.