Alice (1988)
Directed by Jan Švankmajer
A quiet young English girl named Alice finds herself in an alternate version of her own reality after chasing a white rabbit. She becomes surrounded by living inanimate objects and stuffed dead animals, and must find a way out of this nightmare - no matter how twisted or odd that way must be.
6 connections found
View:
6 connections, in both directions
What critics compared Alice to
It's rich with symbols for connection and disassociation, from each patchwork minion dispatched by hero cat Cat (Keith David) releasing its guts in torrents of sand (thus announcing the picture's debt to both Alice in Wonderland and Svankmajer's adaptation of the same, Alice) to an encounter with a trio of child-ghosts ghastly for their expressions, which are frozen at the moments of their betrayals.
Alice in Wonderland didn’t feel like a remake so much as a new version of Lewis Carroll’s classic novel, strained through Tim Burton’s house brand of morbid whimsy and the cultural landscape’s contemporaneous obsession with young-adult-novel-worthy teen action heroines.
Even Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland transforms Lewis Carroll’s story into a journey of self-discovery fit for the 21st century.
It's as if del Toro had uncovered the darker aspects of Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland adventures, the dormant elements ignored by Disney and television (though not by Jan Svankmajer in his disturbing 1988 gem, Alice), and found a home for them in his own fractured fairy tale.
Advertisement
To be fair, it's a skull-faced Easter Bunny named Frank who plants the seed of transition in Donnie's head: Donnie Darko reshapes Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books and is the first film since Edward Scissorhands to cast suburbia as Wonderland and be canny about it.
Burton's latest, the 3D fantasy adventure Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children tries - far too hard - to replicate the Alice effect and falls short.