Jan Švankmajer’s Alice: A Celebration of Our Childlike Imagination
The best adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland shines through its incredible stop-motion representation of a dream.
The most-known adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is Disney’s 1951 animated film. Filled with imagery, which paints the twisted story from the book like a fairy-tale, the animated adaptation detaches itself from its source material to make it more family-friendly. Even the 2010 readaptation from Tim Burton (and its terrible sequel) were silly attempts at creating a “dark” version of the book, while still maintaining family-friendly “comedy” to entertain small children.
In the many adaptations of Carroll’s book, none of them captured the dark, twisted, at times sickening setting of “Wonderland” quite like Jan Švankmajer’s feature film debut, Alice (Něco z Alenky), a surrealist revision of the story. Characterized by its deadpan tone and its innovative use of stop-motion animation to convey a child’s unconscious mind, the film is a terrific downward trip to a how a child conceives a dream (or a nightmare) through the objects and creatures they create in their subconscious.
Right from its destabilizing opening credits sequence, in which a close-up shot of Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) ‘s lips, telling the story, addressing the audience that they “will see a film made for children…perhaps” and reminds them that they must close their eyes because “otherwise, you won’t see anything,” the film sets in motion the style it’s going to adopt.
It won’t be a traditional, magnificent dreamlike adaptation of Alice in Wonderland you’re so used to, but a film that will take you out of your comfort zone to reawaken your imagination and your former representation of dreams when you were a child.
Through its stop-motion animation, Švankmajer unleashes how a child would imagine objects come to life. For example, a taxidermized rabbit breaks his glass cage and rips his stuffed chest to reveal a clock, citing that he’ll be “late,” and Alice chases him down a drawer, which transports her to the rabbit’s lair, as he fills his lifeless body with stuffing.
This entire sequence is built upon Alice’s willpower to dream, as she questions reality while seeing the rabbit get dressed and staring at her with his large, deformed, and gnawing teeth. Once she fits in the drawer and crawls her way inside a pathway filled with set squares, the geometrical rules of time and space are entirely forgotten. Alice will go through a nightmare filled with instances of wonder and transform her from an innocent child to an assumed adult, ready to take charge.
The most astounding moment in Alice has to be the “eat me, drink me” sequence, in which Alice transforms herself, after drinking ink, as a doll to try and get inside a small door. She is incapable of reaching for the key and the door after shrinking and growing multiple times and starts sobbing until she creates a river of tears. A rat swims to Alice’s head and starts cooking rice with her hair.
The entirety of the sequence bases itself on a child’s imagination and how they control their dreams. If they can’t reach something, they only need to eat something to grow, and the same with reaching small places. If rat burns part of your hair to force you to think to get out of a predicament caused by your puddle of tears, all you need to do is imagine what you want to have inside your dream will come together.
Alice forces the audience to accept that everything we see is caused by the pleasures of imagination. Whether it’s being transported to a world filled with stop-motion creatures made out of skulls sent straight from the nether regions of hell or seeing a sadistic rabbit cut off heads for amusement. Every scene isn’t linked to a single narrative structure, as opposed to any other adaptation of Alice you can find, but goes all out in its representation of a subconscious dream. The dream is an unpredictable, ever-transformative path created solely by our subconscious mind feeding real-world elements while morphing them in childlike visions of grandeur for us to confront them.
Some first-person camera movements perfectly represent the peeping eye (and body) of a child, discovering a world like an explorer. The POV views allow the audience to transport themselves in the world of the dream and giving us the exact look of Alice, permitting the audience to be in her shoes during the entirety of her vision.
The first-person view gives the audience a real sense of space. It permits Švankmajer to explore that established space, through immersive, non-predictive camerawork, metamorphic sets and stop-motion characters which light up the screen, giving the audience a real sense of wonder. Alice not only harkens back to the days of a childhood dream but showcases how innocent and expansive the mind of a child truly is. It doesn’t need to tell an explicit story for children and adults to understand Alice’s journey, but to only show what she creates through her dream is enough to reawaken the inner child inside all of us.
It can be scary for young kids, yes, but underneath the frightening, trauma-inducing imagery, contains a mesmerizing spell able to pull you in so easily inside a universe where you’ll face your greatest fears to reshape yourself as someone ready to take charge. It’s the best adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s book because it goes to roots of its source material — to explore the limitless potentialities of the dream by showcasing a twisted world created by a child’s subconscious imagination, no matter how dark it is. If you allow yourself to “close your eyes” and accept the drawer that separates the real world from the dream, you’ll have the time of your life. Just be careful not to be late.
