I’m starting to realize I have a
weakness for filmmakers who have their own distinct style, the type I could
easily recognize even if I didn’t know what movie I was watching. After having a blast watching several of his
short films on YouTube, I became hooked on a lot of the inherent, and
consistent, characteristics of Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer’s films. He’s a hero of sorts of the stop animation
technique, bringing inanimate objects like food and clay sculptures to life in
very perplexing ways. What really got me, after watching a particular short
film by Svankmajer, simply titled Food, was the way actual human actors
were utilized in stop motion sequencing, something known as pixilation, which
created a super strange reality, where people seemed to hover around and move like
androids, and eat like monsters. Of course, stop motion has quite often been
used by many filmmakers, but Svankmajer’s
surreal style tends to lead to pretty morbid and bizarre visuals that are also
amusing and humorous (the fourteen minute short Virile Games (1988) comes to mind).
After making short films for
twenty years, Jan Svankmajer made his
first full length movie, Alice,
inspired by Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865),
a book that is supposedly for kids but still works for adult readers too,
especially ones still in touch with their inner child. The anthropomorphic
creatures of Carroll’s dreamland present
a perfect opportunity for Svankmajer to
create a unique vision with his distinct stop animation style. It’s also that
much creepier and a tad bit disturbing that most of
the creature models used were once living animals, like the skulls, the stuffed White Rabbit, or the barracuda head.
Just about everything we know from the
book is done with a different interpretation, here. Perhaps the simple title of
Alice is fitting enough, for her
dream doesn’t really feel quite like the Wonderland we all know. In this case,
the title Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland could be modified to something more like “Alice’s Nightmares in
an Animator’s Workshop.”
