In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

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.

If you'd like a lumpy ceramic ashtray from a mental patient's therapy session, then this might be the movie for you. Like garbage art, not bound to any rules of quality, Jan Svankmajer here puts some little girl into filthy decrepit locations and films poorly executed stop action experiments with no connection to plot. Some who don't understand that random isn't the same as art may simply adore it. One possibility for college kids chasing a good time - It may be bad enough to watch as one of those movies 'so bad it's good'? - the little girl says 'Said the white rabbit' about 150 times which can be fun to echo back at your dad or film history instructor who made you watch this.

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.

There was a clever bit of staging in another Svankmajer film I saw a few days ago, so I came to this looking for more. I figured if anything, the Alice story, with the entire film staged in the mind, would provide natural opportunities. Alas. I don't blame Svankmajer, he has craftily interpreted the story in a way that appeals to me; in place of overblown spectacle, a nightmare concocted from everyday material, whose handmade textures you can almost reach out and touch. Lofty imaginings from basement essentials. But it remains, from its original conception more than 100 years ago, a nightmare with no footing in a world that matters.It was, of course, designed to baffle logic, a carefully improvised surrealism before its time. After all it is about a young girl's subconscious efforts to apprehend the adult world; so she repeatedly shifts shapes looking for what would fit the door, the accepted shape that grants passage, but once there, she discovers a shapeless Wonderland with no coherence or sanity. But where you still stand to lose your head - in more ways than one.Svankmajer has translated superbly. The film is a long ramble, with riddles continuously thwarted, or diffused in puzzling images, and logic powerless to order the imagined world. During the courtroom scene she is expected to read from the script, but which is utterly nonsensical.The secret notion of course is the obvious; that it's all a purely internal vision of the imaginative mind weaving a narrative. But alas, grounded nowhere. So little time is spent above that the everyday objects she transports inside the fantasy are not charged with anything. Every once in a while, we see the girl's lips move as she shapes the world from the upper level.