In his first feature film, this brilliant screenwriter, visual artist, and director of animated films (and films combining live-action and animation) – with renowned global success for decades – returned to the two springs of his surrealistic poetics: Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and his own creations. Partly inspired by the book, yet mostly projecting his own dreamlike feelings, notions, and childhood memories into Alice’s story – using an alienating effect, as if affirming viewers of the impossibility of setting boundaries between the real world and “real” unreality of fantasy. Alice captures the essence of ideas, tricks, and visual elements from Švankmajer’s previous work. The visual and semantic nonsense is based on absurd slapstick comedies and black humour, while the liberated imagination leads towards liberating viewers’ own imagination.

Czech with English subtitles