Plot: Most casual filmgoers associate animation with twirling princesses, talking toys, and catchy music numbersΓÇöjust pleasant family fun.  Jan Svankmajer rejects this notion.  In works like Alice, he employs the undeniably off-putting technique of combining live-action actors with stop-motion figures.  The effect is a memorably uncanny take on a classic story, making an already-weird childrenΓÇÖs tale even weirder.  Alice makes her way through cupboards, paper walls, and doors of varying sizes in a seemingly never-ending, decaying house (sometimes inexplicably opening up into a woodland field), encountering numerous recognizable characters in unrecognizable forms.  The source material is naturally altered in this re-imagining, both in plot and tone.

The White Rabbit is a rejuvenated taxidermied bunny, with wide plastic eyes and a stomach leaking sawdust.  He chatters his large teeth menacingly and licks his pocketwatch with a humanoid tongue.  The Caterpillar is a torn sock puppet with human eyes and teeth, presiding over a litter of phallic cloth creatures moving rapidly within the floorboards.  The Mad Hatter is a bearded wooden marionette, and the Queen of Hearts is a 2-D cut-paper drawing.  Alice herself becomes an old-fashioned china doll whenever sheΓÇÖs miniaturized.  Each character design fits both the unsettling atmosphere of the film as a whole and the dusty, antique look of the ΓÇ£WonderlandΓÇ¥ house.

An extraordinary facet of Alice is the sound design.  There is absolutely no music.  Svankmajer instead opts for a range of effective, often gratuitous sound effects.  There is very little dialogue, and the few spoken lines by any character are all said by Alice herself, often accompanied by a close-up shot of her mouth as she indicates who is talking.  The special attention to sound effects and lack of conversation among these fantastic creatures actually keep it from becoming a typical fantasy.  Despite the unreal nature of the visuals, it feels more grounded in reality without the specific music cues or over-scripted conversation typical of other films, even while we are consistently drawn back to its status as a fairy tale when AliceΓÇÖs lips are shown narrating.

Alice is the kind of film that isnΓÇÖt especially frighteningΓÇöat least, not in a standard horror-movie sense. Viewers are thus affected because they canΓÇÖt actually figure out what is so scary about it.  Perhaps itΓÇÖs our innate fear of taxidermied animals coming back to life, or the unnaturalness of food moving about on its own, or the inherent creepiness of abandoned houses, or the frequent use of close-up shots, or the eerie stillness that comes with lack of a musical score.  Perhaps itΓÇÖs just the utter uncanniness of everything that happens in this movie.  Whatever it is, itΓÇÖs really weird, and completely captivating.


Rip Specs;


Format                                   : Matroska
Format version                           : Version 2
File size                                : 2.65 GiB
Duration                                 : 1h 25mn
Overall bit rate                         : 4 410 Kbps
Encoded date                             : UTC 2011-06-08 11:11:19
Writing application                      : mkvmerge v4.4.0 ('Die Wiederkehr') built on Oct 31 2010 21:52:48
Writing library                          : libebml v1.0.0 + libmatroska v1.0.0

Video
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Duration                                 : 1h 25mn
Bit rate                                 : 4 153 Kbps
Width                                    : 960 pixels
Height                                   : 720 pixels
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Language                                 : English
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Duration                                 : 1h 25mn
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Language                                 : Czech
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