The 13th Floor

Alice (Neco z Alensky) was Czech surrealist animator Jan Švankmajer's first full-length feature film, and combines stop-motion animation with live action. In some ways it's a very loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland but in another sense it's very faithful, as it allows us to experience anew the initial strangeness of that story.

Here the White Rabbit is a manic-looking taxidermy exhibit escaped from its own display case; Bill the Lizard is a sawdust-stuffed crocodile with a bird skull for a head; the Frog Footman swats flies with a pot-denting tongue the size of a cow's; the Mad Hatter is an antique wooden marionette; the March Hare is a wind-up plush toy with a habit of buttering fobwatches; the Dormouse is a slithering fox pelt; and, perhaps most memorably of all, the Caterpillar is a sock puppet with incongruous false teeth and eyes that have to be stitched shut for sleep. These and other defamiliarised figures, reconstructed from items in Alice's bedroom, are as inventively realised as they are genuinely nightmarish – not that Alice herself ever seems much fazed. - Anton Bitel, Eye For Film.

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