Alice

Director: Jan Svankmajer
85 mins Film4 Archive

Jan Svankmajer's creepy and disturbing adaptation of Lewis Carroll's original vision.

Young Alice (Kristyna Kohoutová, spoken by Camilla Power) watches a stuffed and mounted rabbit come to life in her playroom and follows it through a magical drawer into a strange world that resembles a 19th-century toy store come to life, with a few specimens from a natural history museum thrown in. Mixing animation and live action to create a dreamlike world filled with threatening, bizarre characters, the film brilliantly marries a sly visual wit with piercing psychological insight.