When Lewis Carroll set out on the 4th of July, 1862 with Alice Liddell the story he thought up seemed only worth the gift to the child. Little did Carroll know that generations to come would have that same story read to them at bed time. The Disney rendition of Alice in Wonderland is dreamy and endearing and seems to be a constant in the lives of children ever since its release in 1951. Jan Švankmajer Alice from 1988 is a largely stop action film filled with unsettling images of taxidermy animals and creatures reconstructed out of bone, disturbing to the most mature audiences. What makes each of these films stand out is their overwhelming ability to evoke emotion through their visual presentation. While Disney and Švankmajer’s presentation could not be any more polar opposites, they are individually impressive in their own way.
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland is dreamy and almost overwhelming at times in its visual presentation. The use of color mirrors the dreamy quality: a purple stripped Cheshire Cat, the blue body and pink hands of the caterpillar and the psychedelic color smoke rings he blows as he speaks. A victory celebrated by the production of this film is the various moving elements in every scene, complimented by backgrounds that hold light and line with a shadowy, dream like calm. The music and sound effects compliment the visual wonders of this work. Despite the uncertain, “curious” tone that runs through the film in faith to the literature, there maintains an upbeat, light tone, which might be why Disney’s Alice in Wonderland seems to have turned into a classic children’s film.
While artistic license gives creative individuals the space to create, Jan Švankmajer turned a possibly surreal story into a frightening nightmare. While much of the film is stop motion, Alice is also played by a living person, which gives the stop action a crude, machine like quality. The creatures of Švankmajer’s Wonderland are a mixture of dead, preserved animals and skeletons attached to mechanical objects. This bringing to life of static objects is strange and frightening when accompanied by the clacking of the White Rabbit’s teeth or the squeaking of the wheels as it drags behind a skull and section of spine. And if the film’s monstrous creatures don’t round out the nightmarish quality, the poorly lit, gritty sets seem to finish it off. It is clear that Švankmajer’s work influenced Tim Burton and other animators. Švankmajer’s Alice is far too chilling and unsettling a work to do much more than shock and upset its audience.
