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
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Audience Rating: Unrated Binding: DVD Brand: Jan EAN: 9786305779636 Format: Animated, Color, DVD, Live, NTSC ISBN: 6305779635 Label: FIRST RUN FEATURES Languages:SpanishOriginal LanguageDolby Digital 2.0 MonoEnglishSubtitled Manufacturer: FIRST RUN FEATURES MPN: 909266 Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: FIRST RUN FEATURES Region Code: 1 Release Date: April 11, 2000 Running Time: 91 minutes Studio: FIRST RUN FEATURES Theatrical Release Date: 1988
Customer Reviews
A wonderfully weird and bizzar interpetation of Alice in Wonderland
I'm picky about my foreign films. Mostly, I don't care much for reading subtitles for 2hrs, but this one intrigued me. Surprisingly, this film doesn't have subtitles, there is very little dialog and it is dubbed over in English. I think that the director was counting on most of the audience to already be familiar with Louis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland stories. I love the animation, and while it lacks the more "cleanly" animated films of present such as Corpse Bride and Coraline, it has a very ... Read More