Alice vs Alice and other things

        I tried I really did! With Chinese New Year coming up in a few days (at the time), I really wanted to do the Springtime in a Small Town comparison. Strangely (or not), the 1948 version by Fei Mu is widely available but the 2003 remake by Tian Zhuang Zhuang is pretty much impossible to locate. I managed to find it on ok.ru and rarefilm.net, but the picture quality of the former is terrible and the latter would  have taken 14 hours to download. I had to scramble to find another  comparison to do, and I settled for Jan Svankmajer's Alice vs the 1951 Disney animated version. That's not all though, because I felt obligated to read Lewis Carrol's original novel as well, just so I can get a grasp of the original story. For brevity's sake and for my own sanity, this will be my shortest post yet.

                                                    

     Neither of the two Alice's are all that faithful to the original short story. Svankmajer ditches the illogical whimsy of the short story for a darker, more Freudian-esque exploration of Alice's subconscious. This is most clearly demonstrated at the beginning and end, where objects in Alice's house appear as various creatures in her imagination, but less obvious are things like the scissors, eggs hatching into skulls and a loaf of bread with nails growing out of it, suggesting a preoccupation with death and violence. The aesthetic of the film naturally lends itself to a darker reading, as the environment around Alice is often cold and grimy, and it's characters are always out there to exploit her. Unlike the Disney adaptation, you don't need to be told that a child shouldn't belong; that sense of unease constantly permeates the film. Adding to that feeling is the use of uncomfortable close ups, and the animals themselves. Shots of the white rabbit gnashing its teeth and a skeletal lizard being sewn up with sawdust linger in the mind longer after finishing the film. Sound design is remarkable as well; a distinct lack of music, constant creaking noises and in particular when a creature crawls out of the a teapot to clear the tea cups in the Mad Hatter's house, the slurping noises feel unnervingly...human.

    It must be said however, that it seems as though the source material is stretched too thin to support a full length feature, as some scenes feel repetitive and in the middle sequence involving the house the film almost grinds to a halt. Those are some minor issues in what I think is an otherwise glorious stop motion experiment and an inspired reinterpretation of a classic surreal short story.

★★★★ (out of five)

                                                 

After seeing the Svankmajer film, the Dinsey film feels like a shock to my system. It opens with a panning shot of beautiful meadows, flowers and butterflies dancing to orchestral music in the background. The art and animation is of high quality, as to be expected of a film produced under Walt himself, but the colours are a little too bright, the creatures too pleasant, all of which make it feel as if the book's sharper, satiric edges have been sanded off. For a film with so much dialogue, much of the book's word play has also been taken out, perhaps in an effort to make it more easily digestible to young children. Worst of all though, the film removes most of Alice's inner monologues and give us nothing in return, reducing her to a blank slate that is mostly there to react to things happening to her. It's quite disappointing that Svankmajer's film, with a hundred times less dialogue, manages to give Alice more of a personality. 

    Fortunately, the things that she reacts to are interesting in of themselves. If there is one thing that the Disney version does better than Svankmajer's Alice, is that there are enough things moving on screen constantly that you will never be bored.  It's pleasure enough just listening to the voice of the Cheshire cat (Sterling Holloway)  and the Caterpillar (Richard Hadyn). The musical sequences are superb, and the short story about Walruses and Oysters was, for me, is the highlight of the entire film. I assume that replaces the story of the mock turtle in the book and I think that was a good decision. These somewhat make up for the weaker parts of the film. Overall, not as strong as the Svankmajer version but still worth seeing.

★★★ (out of five)

    Since my holiday is coming to a close, I have some changes I want to make to the content here. First of all, there will be lesser articles from now on, one to two per month. Secondly, I realized that I don't enjoy writing long form articles on a single film, and having to write them actively lessens my enjoyment of watching movies, so from now one most of my posts will be in the format of this post, with long form articles reserved for films I either really love or really hate.