Alice (1988 film)
| Alice | |
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Czechoslovak theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Jan Švankmajer |
| Produced by | Peter-Christian Fueter |
| Screenplay by | Jan Švankmajer |
| Based on |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll |
| Starring | Kristýna Kohoutová |
| Cinematography | Svatopluk Malý |
| Edited by | Marie Zemanová |
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Production
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| Distributed by | First Run Features |
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Release date
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Running time
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84 minutes |
| Country | Czechoslovakia Switzerland United Kingdom West Germany Soviet Union |
| Language | Czech |
Alice is a 1987 dark fantasy film written and directed by Jan Švankmajer. Its original Czech title is Něco z Alenky, which means "Something from Alice". It is a loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll's first Alice book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), about a girl who follows a white rabbit into a bizarre fantasy land. Alice is played by Kristýna Kohoutová. The film combines live action with stop motion animation, and is distinguished by its dark and uncompromising production design.
For Švankmajer, a prolific director of short films for more than two decades, Alice became his first venture into feature-length filmmaking. The director had been disappointed by other adaptations of Carroll's book, which interpret it as a fairy tale. His aim was instead to make the story play out like an amoral dream. The film won the feature film award at the 1989 Annecy International Animated Film Festival.
A bored Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) narrates to herself a series of events and characters that portrays a surreal tour into Wonderland, starting with a taxidermically stuffed White Rabbit coming to life, dressing up from a hidden drawer and escaping from its glass box. Alice follows the Rabbit inside a desk on top of a hill that appears next to the room, and soon after she finds herself heading downstairs in an elevator displaying strange household items to finally fall into a room with a tiny locked door at the lower base of a large door.
Alice shrinks and enlarges her size by drinking from an ink bottle and eating from a cookie that suddenly appears. Frustrated by still being unable to go through the tiny door where the Rabbit wanders, an enlarged Alice floods the room with her tears. Then, a sailing mouse docks on her head and tries to prepare a cooking fire with her hair. A displeased Alice submerges and the mouse swims away. Soon after, she is able to go through the door by shrinking again with some cookies that produce out of nowhere in the waters.
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