So, my mind was just blown. I have probably seen 7 or 8 movie adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and honestly couldn't name one that I found particularly effective or even able to hold my attention for the entire length, which is frustrating to me because I am so in love with the story.
Alice in Wonderland is probably one of the most overused/overreferenced narratives in art (just think photography alone) and is so infrequently done in a way that breathes it new life that it's almost tragic.
Enter Czech animator Jan Švankmajer's "Alice" (1988). I've always been really into stop motion animation (The Nightmare Before Christmas was my favorite movie from an alarmingly young age) and this interest has recently been kicked into high gear, so there couldn't have been a better time for me to watch this film.
I'm still not sure how I'd never heard of Švankmajer, since apparently he is not only a well known surrealist film maker, but one of the world's foremost animators, and an inspiration to some of my favorites (including Burton). His version of Alice struck me for a number of reasons, mainly being that he actually made it his own (ie made some major detail changes while sticking to the general feel of the story versus just presenting a play-by-play of the book), the look of the piece visually (what i understand to be his animation aesthetic is just astounding), and the way he has incorporated EVERYTHING that i'm interested in into a story that I already loved (repetition, abandoned spaces, taxidermy, etc etc etc). He manages to project a very dark telling of Alice, which I feel is often attempted and almost never pulled off (for a good photographic example of it working search Anna Gaskell's photographic series "Wonder" and "Override"). Some of the brilliant changes Švankmajer incorporates include having Alice become a doll when she shrinks, and having the rabbit be a taxidermied piece, who keeps his pocketwatch in his sawdust-filled chest.
Anyway, the film is beautiful and all things surreal, and I can not wait to get my hands on more of his work. If you have netflix "Alice" is available on DVD as well as the "instant" watch option, I would definitely recommend checking it out. You can also watch clips of it on youtube but the quality isn't really fabulous (read: awful) and it's really worth seeing the whole film together.
For more information on Švankmajer see his website or his wikipedia page (which oddly enough seems to have more on him than his website).
photos are screen-grabs from youtube.
