#21: Alice Thought to Herself...

(Alice, 1988, Jan Svankamjer)

I'll admit, I've been putting off the weird stuff. The List is filled with bizarre films that I have never heard of, and for the last few months I've been avoiding them. I haven't necessarily meant to, I keep reminding myself that I have to watch ALL the films on The List and not just the ones that please me, but I've still attempted to dodge the ones that make me cringe a little when I read their descriptions. Like Eyes Without a Face. Or Audition. I wasn't ready yet, okay? Okay. But after I wrote #20 I realized that the time had come to watch something weird. I suppose one could argue that Blue Velvet was pretty weird, but it's in English and doesn't have stop motion animal skulls, so I'm going to argue otherwise. Alice is weird.

Alice was also mercifully short. At 86 minutes it was fairly easy to swallow, even though I did have to stop it after the first 30, take a nap, and come back later. My brain just couldn't take that much stop-motion weirdness all at once. And that's coming from someone who loved The Nightmare Before Christmas the first time she saw it at age 5. But The Nightmare Before Christmas is charming in is absurdity. It has cute songs, and a cute little ghost dog, and a likable main character with good intentions who just happens to be a bit misguided in them. Alice doesn't have any of that. And Alice is based on Alice in Wonderland, so you'd kind of think it would be inherently charming. It's not.

First of all, the little girl who plays Alice looks an awful lot like she could have played one of the scary twins in The Shining. Except blond. Sure, she's got big blue eyes and could easily be cute, but the way it's filmed makes her seem nothing short of terrifying. Second, there is nothing charming about a caterpillar who's really a sock with glass eyes and dentures. Most of the usual Wonderland characters are unusual approximations of themselves. The White Rabbit is actually a mounted white rabbit that pulls free of its mountings and roams around in stop-motion. Complete with unblinking glass eyes. And the Mad Hatter is a very large, wooden marionette that looks like a cross between Don Quixote and a Hasidic Jew. The March Hare is a giant wind-up toy. Some of the little woodland creatures are not creatures, but just skeletons or skulls with glass eyes and weird limbs. And the caterpillar is a sock. It's more than a little unusual. Thirdly, the entire film is narrated by Alice, including the other characters' dialogue. And when the narration is something like "said the Mad Hatter," or "muttered the White Rabbit," the camera shows a close-up of Alice's mouth. Eerie.

I do have a few good things to say about the film. For one, the mad tea party scene is really cool, despite frequent eerie close-ups of Alice's mouth narrating the scene. It plays out well, with interesting cuts and the March Hare frequently needing winding since he is, after all, a wind-up toy. Also, the playing card characters are pretty cool since they are actual playing cards. But overall, Alice was just a weird, surrealist journey that I couldn't really commit to. I wanted to, in a way, because I like the Alice in Wonderland story, but I'd rather just have a colorful Wonderland with cute rabbits and a charming but insane Mad Hatter. And maybe Alan Rickman's voice behind the caterpillar. Maybe that's too much to ask.