This is possibly the best-regarded of the myriad film versions of Lewis Carroll's "Alice In Wonderland", a relatively recent undertaking but a distinctly individualistic one by famed Czech animator/puppeteer Svankmajer (and which actually served as my introduction to his work). Knowing of its reputation, I had long desired to watch the film; however, having done so, I can't help feeling slightly let down not because it's not as good as I expected, or as weird as I had been led to believe but, rather, because of the liberties it takes with Carroll's original.
God knows there are enough bizarre characters, situations and dialogue in the perennial children's classic (popularized by previous film and TV adaptations, both live-action and animated); however, Svankmajer opts to drop many of these (we're left with an awful lot of the White Rabbit, The Frog, The Fish, The Duchess and the Baby-turned-Pig, the members of the eccentric Tea Party, the Croquet game, etc.) for his own creations. It's not so much that I'm a purist where such things are concerned but, to me, what novelties we get in this version are not only unnecessary (though they sure make for some arresting, to say nothing of far from kiddie, visuals and occasionally amusing such as the fact that the White Rabbit's interior consists of sawdust which it also eats[!] or The Mouse building a fire and setting up tent on Alice's scalp) but, frankly, no match for what Carroll himself had envisaged to begin with. Consequently, the author's absurdist but essentially innocent viewpoint doesn't jell with the film-maker's outbursts of savage surrealism so that one has a hard time believing at the end that it was all a little girl's fantasy!
With this in mind, the heroine here is perhaps the only one I've seen who's anywhere near the right age for the character (incidentally, Alice is replaced by a doll when she shrinks in size!); even so, Svankmajer's decision to have her provide constant narration often of the most elementary kind, thus rendering it somewhat monotonous is baffling to say the least!
God knows there are enough bizarre characters, situations and dialogue in the perennial children's classic (popularized by previous film and TV adaptations, both live-action and animated); however, Svankmajer opts to drop many of these (we're left with an awful lot of the White Rabbit, The Frog, The Fish, The Duchess and the Baby-turned-Pig, the members of the eccentric Tea Party, the Croquet game, etc.) for his own creations. It's not so much that I'm a purist where such things are concerned but, to me, what novelties we get in this version are not only unnecessary (though they sure make for some arresting, to say nothing of far from kiddie, visuals and occasionally amusing such as the fact that the White Rabbit's interior consists of sawdust which it also eats[!] or The Mouse building a fire and setting up tent on Alice's scalp) but, frankly, no match for what Carroll himself had envisaged to begin with. Consequently, the author's absurdist but essentially innocent viewpoint doesn't jell with the film-maker's outbursts of savage surrealism so that one has a hard time believing at the end that it was all a little girl's fantasy!
With this in mind, the heroine here is perhaps the only one I've seen who's anywhere near the right age for the character (incidentally, Alice is replaced by a doll when she shrinks in size!); even so, Svankmajer's decision to have her provide constant narration often of the most elementary kind, thus rendering it somewhat monotonous is baffling to say the least!