Hear Me Out: Jan Švankmajer’s ‘Alice’ is the best version of ‘Alice in Wonderland’
There have been many iterations of Lewis Carrol’s infamous surrealist fairy tale over the years, with the likes of Tim Burton, Clyde Geronimi and Nick Willing putting their own twist on Alice in Wonderland in an effort to capture the same twisted magic as the original novel. There’s a maze of strange details in the book that have endless adaptive possibilities on the silver screen, with small tangents and twists such as the quest for turtle soup, the woman whose baby is a pig and the battle between Alice and the rabbit as she is pelted with stones that turn into cakes.
However, while there are some novels that are perfectly suited for the medium of film, there are some that struggle to fully translate to the big screen, with details that you can clearly see inside your head but, once visually articulated, somehow end up being disappointing and completely detached from how you imagined it. There are many versions of Alice in Wonderland that have fallen to the same fate, with some directors failing to capture the simultaneous nightmare, danger and dream-like bubble of the made-up world. However, there is one director who achieved something no one else has, creating what I think is the best and most bizarre adaptation of the beloved story.
Alice, directed by Jan Švankmajer, loosely follows the familiar story of a young girl called Alice, with the main character falling down something that loosely resembles a rabbit hole and shortly descends into an upside-down world plagued by talking rabbits, a sadistic queen and biscuits with mysterious powers. However, while this may sound similar to the story we know and love, Švankmajer executes an entirely different take on the tale that left me completely speechless, capturing the essence of madness and unpredictability in the story we picture in our heads.
Alice is Švankmajer’s version of wonderland – an alternate reality in which wonderland is actually a derelict house full of stuffed animals and living inanimate objects, with the director cleverly combining the medium of stop-motion with live-action. Through this unique style, Švankmajer perfectly realises a child’s imagination by seeing everyday objects come to life, with scissors, socks and pieces of raw steak springing to action in a slightly grotesque and comical fashion. While Burton attempted to create a darker version of the book (which, in my opinion, failed miserably), Švankmajer wanted to exaggerate the surrealism of the story through the film’s setting, with the fantastical narrative clashing against the realist environment that it takes place in, with each scene making use of real-world objects and places but creating dissonance through how they are used.
Alice first finds wonderland after opening up a desk and crawling through a strangely deep drawer that leads her to something that looks like an underground bunker, with the white rabbit pulling a clock from inside his stomach, indifferent to the sawdust that falls from his insides each time he does this. Alice follows him inside a sparse and brutalist-looking house, going from one empty room to another and switching between being a stop-motion doll version of herself and a human girl. It isn’t the same version of wonderland that we’re used to but instead captures a more realistic version of wonderland by replicating the subconscious ideas of a child, something that is infused with elements of the adult world and her own imagination.
The inner world of a child is often tainted through the things they’re exposed to in their everyday life, something that Švankmajer explores through Alice’s version of Wonderland, which is both abstract and quite logical. If there is a problem, she can imagine a convenient solution to get out of the situation, such as a tiny bottle of liquid that will morph her body into a different size. When this fails, a rat starts cooking rice with her hair while she cries a river of tears, forcing her to find another solution before this becomes another problem.
Much like our own dreams, each situation Alice encounters isn’t necessarily linked to anything else, existing as its own standalone moment that is somehow connected to everything else. Often, when we dream, we magically move from one scenario to another, finding ourselves in another dream despite being aware that they were all linked together while we were experiencing it. It’s entirely unpredictable and continuously transforming before our eyes, shrouding mundane details of everyday life with childlike illusions and fantasies, which in some way forces us to confront the binaries of the adult world and reconnect with the endless possibilities of a lost perspective.
Švankmajer’s interpretation of the story is, at times, creepy and disturbing, but manages to do so without ever being truly terrifying. Alice isn’t perturbed by anything she sees, confronting each obstacle with a matter-of-fact attitude and unwavering resilience. However, the decaying stuffed toys and grotesque objects, such as a jar full of nails and a steak that slides around the room, can also be seen as representing the death of childhood itself, with Alice being unable to delve into a part of her imagination that is entirely separate from her waking life. In this sense, Švankmajer’s version of Alice in Wonderland contains a darker edge that reflects a more realistic fear, subconsciously charting a young girl’s reckoning with her departure from childhood and the loss of innocence as the adult world begins to infect her dreams, something that would typically be the most freeing realm for a young person’s imagination.
Through the organised chaos of this bric-a-brac world, Alice imagines a new purpose for the strange collection of inanimate objects in each room, allowing her to construct a dream-like version of the everyday quotidian. While her imagination allows her to bend the meaning and function of stuffed toys, furniture and kitchen appliances, each one is drenched in the unsettling mundanity of its real-life purpose, allowing for a psychoanalytical reading of the classic story and Alice’s attempt to escape the clutches of the grown-up world, but still being followed by them in her dreams, engulfed in the inevitable reality of adulthood and the imminent death of her ability to imagine.
