Alice Blu-Ray Review

• 19th May 2011

Ha!  Tim Burton wishes he was this inventive. I was very happy when the American director’s version of Lewis Carroll’s classic story came out a couple of years back and many a critic in the know cited this version by director Jan Švankmajer as a more superior effort.

Stop-motion seems to be a dying trend; but every character on screen here, aside from Alice herself, is part of that stop-motion machine. So, if you find yourself warming to the style and the story – then just put a thought aside for this process before it dies completely.

The film itself follows the familiar plotline – but does interpret the work for its own means and ends, as well as introducing a few new elements along the way into the story. Carroll’s story is so rich in flavour that it is easy for a director such as Švankmajer to be creative. One might even argue that he isn’t even trying to adapt the novel. But then there is faithful adaptation and artistic license adaptation. This is the latter.

For a film over 20 years old, the Blu-ray was going to require a bit of work. Thankfully the word “restoration” was indeed applied. The film is still a little masterpiece and a huge lesson to those artists out there that a lot of work and creativity can yield great results, regardless of the state of film-making today. CGI may be the way forward in terms of effects, but Alice proves that stop-motion doesn’t have to be the way back.

The extras are a curious bunch. They include low budget short films mostly taken from the source material of the novel but also including the use of stop-motion. The most prominent of these workers today are perhaps the Quay brothers who, like Švankmajer, have worked in both short film and feature presentations.

This was Švankmajer’s first feature length film and he was way into his 50s when he made it. It’s a beautiful, creepy and very artistic piece of work which, thanks to the BFI, isn’t in any danger of falling off the radar any time soon.

Steven Hurst