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An Exercise In Nonsense

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

A dark and surreal adaptation of Alice in Wonderland combining stop- motion animation and live action. It's not really a children's movie but as the dreams of Alice are unravelled in the wonderland, here more like a nightmare land, the close-up shots of narrations that represents an innocent child are quite distracting. This film is really daring in using such a popular children's story and turning it into a nightmarishly dark and surreal adaptation that shows Alice's dreams in which she's living the trauma that represents the things happening in real life. It's the repetition of certain events that clarify her view of the world treating her.

If you are a fan of random, loud, annoying noises and pictures; solely intended to be an eye/ear sore, then this is the film for you. I used to have very vivid, haunting, random dreams of shapes and noises when I was a child that used to haunt me at night. This film is very similar to those dreams.You would have to be another level of pretentious to give this film a positive rating, or refer to it as "art"It is nonsense for the sake of nonsense. The sole intention of this film is to wind people up. I think Jan Svankmajer did this film for a laugh to see what he could get away with, knowing full well that some so called "film critics" would still give it rave reviews, however skin crawlingly pointlessIf I could stop one person from watching this film with this review I feel that I would have made the world a slightly better placeThe only possible use for this movie would be for torture. This is far more psychologically harmful than waterboardingIt angers me that this film exists and the fact that it won an award makes me sick

A loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll's ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND, this otherworldly piece of work marks the first feature-length filmmaking from Czech stop- motion animation master Jan Svankmajer since he threw himself into this line of work in the 1960s. It is live action combines stop-motion, Alice is play by the cherubic Kohoutová, while her smaller version and other characters are all made of puppets (mostly grotesque) and cards ("off with their heads", the Red Heart Queen often commands), and "the wonderland" is set in a neglected building, often Alice stumbles into a room with surrealistic happenings and there is always a desk with a drawer, and whenever Alice tries to open the drawer, she would mechanically pull out the drawer knob first, take a stumble, then use some instrument to open it. The repetition is rather unexciting for the feature-length, the same can be referred to the annoying close-up to Alice's lips whenever she do the voice-over of the lines of herself (sometimes her thoughts) and all the puppet characters, with the obdurate emphasis of mentioning the addresser in the end of each sentence. As much as I admire the fluid technique of the animation and its fantastic imagination of concocting such a surrealistic template, I can not dispel the awareness of some certain degree of frustration and boredom from time to time. Furthermore, it is not a children's film in any sense, the setting is creepy and uncanny, the characters including the white rabbit, the mad hatter, the March hare, the caterpillar, the frog and the fish, are more germane to appear in nightmares than day dreams, their behavior is irrational and repetitive, so is Alice's robotic acting, too amateur to invite viewers being involved profoundly. The recurring visual themes begin to take its toll in the long run, maybe short is a much more appropriate media for Svankmajer's art form, in any case, it is a beguiling novelty with some innovate ideas, plus it must take meticulous elbow grease to pull off such a big project, although I can be hardly enjoy this film, stand in awe of the final product, Svankmajer is a one-of-a-kind virtuoso in this particular tributary, this is a fact no one can contradict and the film is a true eye-opener if judging on its own merits.

My favourite screen adaptation of Carroll's classic novel, because it's so different from the cute dreamy candy-coloured wonderland which Alice is usually visiting. I still haven't read the source material; I probably think I've become too old for it by now, but that's just a stupid excuse. Or maybe because I know the story inside and out (as depicted by Disney and other overly optimistic offerers). That's why I was so positively surprised by Svankmajer's dark and eerie version, far from what I would have expected even when I read the filmmaker's name. Svankmajer does make strange little films, from what I know and saw so far, sometimes even quite whacky stuff. This film is no exception, but it has an uniquely morbid atmosphere due to the fascinating stop-motion animation and the unsettling sound effects. There's no conventional dialog which is reduced to a minimum and mostly recited by Alice herself from a third person perspective with the attachment "...says the white rabbit" et al. This technique doesn't allow us to feel with and for Alice and to delve into her fate; it rather makes us aware that we are merely within a tale. There's no way we can get lost in the intellectual world of six-year-old Alice; she remains to be a self-contained, pretty incommunicative little girl that's just trying to get out of this nightmare (without being ignorant to oddities that constantly pass her way out), and we are just observers of her dream. It's a film made not for everyone for sure; as a squeamish romantic or a lover of the more optimistic versions, you'd probably hate it. I, for one, am all in for a morbid, decayed, rotten cinematic vision, especially when it hits a children's classic and completely turns it upside down.