Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: This is Rob Lamb and my name is Seth Nicholas Johnson.
Speaker 1: That's right, Joe is still out on parental leaves. So
Speaker 1: this week on Weird House Cinema, Seth is serving as
Speaker 1: guest co host. Seth of course produces the show UH
Speaker 1: and Uh and also hosts the podcast Rusty Needles Record Club.
Speaker 1: So we've actually been cooking this episode up for a while.
Speaker 1: I guess I think maybe just kind of off hand
Speaker 1: conversation many many months back, you said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: if I were to pick a Weird House film, I'd
Speaker 1: go with Alice from UH film by check stop motion
Speaker 1: animation master John's funk Meyer. And here we are. You know,
Speaker 1: I think the listener might have been in on that conversation.
Speaker 1: I think that might have happened in a listener mail
Speaker 1: episode in real time. So so yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: the audience has been along with us for this entire ride.
Speaker 1: Here we are at our destination. Yeah, this this is
Speaker 1: a film I had never watched before. I was familiar
Speaker 1: with it because I'm familiar with um with Jon s
Speaker 1: frank Meyer's work to a certain extent. I've seen some
Speaker 1: of his work before, and we'll get into that as
Speaker 1: as we go. But yeah, setting down and watching this
Speaker 1: for the first time, this was an experience I had
Speaker 1: just hours ago. I mean, it's it's it's a wonderful film.
Speaker 1: It's one I've I've grown up with um and because
Speaker 1: of that, I love to introduce people to it because
Speaker 1: I do think that if people, I mean there are
Speaker 1: there are obviously hundreds of adaptations of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
Speaker 1: mostly because it's public domain, but it's also got really
Speaker 1: great recognizability, and I think more than that, it's actually
Speaker 1: just a truly wonderful book. Like like, it's one of
Speaker 1: my favorite children's books full stop. Probably just one of
Speaker 1: my favorite books period. Like, I think Alice's Adventures in
Speaker 1: Wonderland is probably the first book that I fell in
Speaker 1: love with as a child that never went away. You know.
Speaker 1: Obviously there's a lot of children's books that kind of
Speaker 1: fall by the wayside, but that one I was like,
Speaker 1: oh no, this is like high quality literature that can
Speaker 1: stick with me throughout the ages, and and it has.
Speaker 1: It's been a book that I've read dozens of times.
Speaker 1: So how how did this film come into your life?
Speaker 1: Do you remember, particularly like how you ended up watching
Speaker 1: it for the first time, and how you latched onto it.
Speaker 1: I think, and this this is a while ago, so
Speaker 1: I'm not entirely sure. I think as a youth, there
Speaker 1: was a specific adaptation from the nineteen eighties of Alice's
Speaker 1: Adventures in Wonderland that I really enjoyed that took yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I think I was trying to track that
Speaker 1: one down, and instead I came across this nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, started watching it, and then
Speaker 1: just like, nope, I'm going to finish this. You know
Speaker 1: this is the wrong adaptation, but I'm here for it.
Speaker 1: For for my own part, I think I basically came
Speaker 1: into John's funk Meyer a couple of ways via interest
Speaker 1: in like industrial music, and then also by virtue of
Speaker 1: moving to Atlanta, where we have the Center for Puppetry Art,
Speaker 1: and pretty at least at the time, there's kind of
Speaker 1: a robust, uh independent puppetry art scene, and and also
Speaker 1: a great video rental store in Video Drone that has
Speaker 1: a lot of the films, a lot of the films
Speaker 1: all of john S Funkmeyer, and also many of the
Speaker 1: individuals who are either his peers or people that influenced
Speaker 1: him and um And in terms of like downstream influences,
Speaker 1: like I feel like, especially in the West, like if
Speaker 1: you were someone who did any kind of weird puppetry
Speaker 1: or weird stop motion, I feel like his work is
Speaker 1: probably or was probably on your radar. So even things
Speaker 1: like creepy tool videos, which I think for a lot
Speaker 1: of people like that's kind of your first um introduction
Speaker 1: to strange stop motion, Like even that I don't think
Speaker 1: would exist without a world in which we have Jance Funkmeyer.
Speaker 1: I think there's a couple of really mainstream influences that
Speaker 1: the average person has seen too. For example, both Wes
Speaker 1: Anderson stop motion films Uh, The Fantastic Mr Fox and
Speaker 1: um Isle of Dogs. Both of them have this very
Speaker 1: deliberate look where the characters have for and they clearly
Speaker 1: kind of rustle a bit from frame to frame. You
Speaker 1: can see the you can see the handmade aesthetic in them,
Speaker 1: and that I think is is clearly an influence and
Speaker 1: homage and just kind of like an aesthetic choice that
Speaker 1: Jan spank Meyer and you know, his contemporaries were doing
Speaker 1: and they were doing it just because it's it's what
Speaker 1: they were able to do the the Wes Anderson films.
Speaker 1: I think they're doing it as like a note, we
Speaker 1: want this to look handmade, we want you to see
Speaker 1: the creator in every frame, just like these older stop
Speaker 1: motion projects. So I think it's a wonderful look and
Speaker 1: it does feel very handmade. You know. Yeah, there's they're
Speaker 1: strong tactile um details in this film, like and and
Speaker 1: it gets into the soundscape as well that we'll we'll
Speaker 1: discuss here in a bit, like every all these very
Speaker 1: very little objects that are manipulated, all the things and
Speaker 1: creatures that are moving around. Um, it's I guess this
Speaker 1: this might be to a certain some extent what Joe
Speaker 1: sometimes describes as I rubbed the fur film tho the
Speaker 1: same thing, and that you can imagine yourself holding these objects.
Speaker 1: They're they're all these little often grimy or not really
Speaker 1: grimy details. But uh, I don't know this whole film.
Speaker 1: There are many times in the film where I like
Speaker 1: really wanted to grab a broom. The meat freaking me
Speaker 1: was like I could get a broom in there and
Speaker 1: and do some work, and also perhaps warned this young
Speaker 1: girl not to touch these things. You know, don't don't
Speaker 1: stick your finger in that, Alice. No, a lot of
Speaker 1: these things seemed very dangerous, and I was worried for her,
Speaker 1: which which I'm sure is intentional from the director. Now, Alice,
Speaker 1: I think it is very much a fascinating film, one
Speaker 1: worth seeking out. But I think you do need to
Speaker 1: know what getting into here. Um, this isn't really a warning,
Speaker 1: but just just letting you know. This is a film
Speaker 1: with a very very subdued pacing, a single human actor
Speaker 1: who is also a child, strange ruinous sets, bizarre stop
Speaker 1: motion animation, and virtually no musical score. It's also far
Speaker 1: more watchable and enjoyable than anything I just said makes
Speaker 1: it sound. Uh, it's not nearly as creepy as as
Speaker 1: that is it makes, as we may be making it sound,
Speaker 1: but it's also not un creepy. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: this is for children and adults who who like the
Speaker 1: darker side of fantasy, you know. I mean, like, for example,
Speaker 1: when I grew up, and I'm sure you were the same,
Speaker 1: I loved things like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal. So
Speaker 1: so therefore this fit in that for me. Obviously it's
Speaker 1: a bit more art house than either of those, but
Speaker 1: but it's still you know, it would would be a
Speaker 1: part of that world, at least into my child eyes
Speaker 1: and partially to my adult eyes. Yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: there's something in this film that some might say or
Speaker 1: interpreted as it is horrific but or or scary, But
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't I don't think there's anything
Speaker 1: overtly scary or mean about the film. I think for
Speaker 1: the most part, there is this sense of wonder. It
Speaker 1: may be get kind of a dark leaning wonder, but
Speaker 1: it is authentic wonder. And there's like a sense of
Speaker 1: humor to it too, Like I I believe Jon spank
Speaker 1: Meyer he must have known some of these grotesque puppets
Speaker 1: that he created had kind of a goofy look to them,
Speaker 1: you know. And and and in fact, there's there's one
Speaker 1: shot which perhaps I would say is the only quote
Speaker 1: unquote scary shot of like almost like a jump scare
Speaker 1: from like a frog creature, but it's he's got such
Speaker 1: a goofy face that you aren't really scared. It's just
Speaker 1: sort of like, what is that? Yeah, the creatures we
Speaker 1: encounter are generally silly enough looking that it kind of
Speaker 1: disarms the terror that might that you might expect to
Speaker 1: be there when saying things like and then the poorly
Speaker 1: taxidermy and rotting animals come alive and start crawling all
Speaker 1: over the place. It's true, it's it's it's a charming
Speaker 1: version of poorly animated taxidermy. Duff. Yeah, yeah, no, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's fun and goofy and charming and disturbing and
Speaker 1: dirty and a little frightening. Um. When I was trying
Speaker 1: to think of elevator pitches for the film, I mean,
Speaker 1: for to a certain extent, doesn't need one. It's kind
Speaker 1: of a legendary film and and that's kind of the
Speaker 1: maybe one of the challenges and even talking about it
Speaker 1: because like with within and you can speak more to
Speaker 1: this than I can, but within the world of stop
Speaker 1: motion and stop motion animation, like this is a big film,
Speaker 1: like and this is a master we're dealing with here,
Speaker 1: and not not even to mention the subject matter, Like
Speaker 1: I think, even if someone hasn't seen this film, I
Speaker 1: would bet the vast majority of our audience has probably
Speaker 1: read the book, or the very least is familiar with
Speaker 1: all of the beats that happened in this very unconventional story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it does stick to a lot of the major beats,
Speaker 1: so which I do that. I think that helps with
Speaker 1: what was force funk Meyer his first if I'm correct
Speaker 1: on this, his first full length film, uh, coming after
Speaker 1: coming off of a string of shorter animated subjects. But
Speaker 1: knowing that those beats are in place, that kind of
Speaker 1: helps propel you through what is essentially, you know, a
Speaker 1: feature length art film. Yeah. No, I feel the same way,
Speaker 1: Like like, even when I'm watching it, I'm most familiar
Speaker 1: with the book that I am with any of the
Speaker 1: film adaptations. When when certain like points in the story hits,
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, they're playing croquet. I know where we are,
Speaker 1: you know, like we're starting to wrap this up, you know.
Speaker 1: But if I were to do an elevator pitch, I'd say,
Speaker 1: it's it's Alice in Wonderland, except in one of the
Speaker 1: houses from Silent Hill, but with the lights turned up
Speaker 1: a bit, so it's not that scary. I think it's
Speaker 1: a it's a fair pitch. There are a lot there's
Speaker 1: a lot of trying to unlock doors and not being
Speaker 1: able to. There are a lot of like range set
Speaker 1: pieces and props, and then of course bizarre creatures that
Speaker 1: you encounter. All right, let's go ahead and listen to
Speaker 1: the trailer audio. This is a legitimate trailer audio from
Speaker 1: the at least the English version of the film. And
Speaker 1: I think it's quite nice because it does it certainly
Speaker 1: doesn't give you any of the rich visuals that are
Speaker 1: of course the main reason for watching the film, but
Speaker 1: it does, I think, perfectly capture many of the elements
Speaker 1: of the sound skin. I shall be too late side
Speaker 1: the white traffic, how lazy side the white traffic. Well,
Speaker 1: the Queen will be curious much of the white trappic
Speaker 1: our invitations for Alice from the queen, said the white trabbic,
Speaker 1: off with the heck, greeen the Queen. Now we'll we'll
Speaker 1: come back to this of course. But yeah, what you
Speaker 1: just heard, the the narration by Alice, the those kind
Speaker 1: of ambient industrial sound effects that are happening in the background,
Speaker 1: like this is the this is the soundscape of the film,
Speaker 1: and and it's um. I I know folks who have
Speaker 1: never really encountered art cinema that when I've shown them this,
Speaker 1: they found that very cloying. But I think if if
Speaker 1: you just accept it, I think it's perfectly fine. I mean,
Speaker 1: in fact, I would say it's a good thing that
Speaker 1: really uh enhances the overall aesthetics of the film, And
Speaker 1: I think it's perfectly chosen. But yeah, I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: not warning you. I'm just letting you know that it's art.
Speaker 1: This is art house. Maybe. Yeah, so you're you're you're
Speaker 1: talking about the the Alice narration, the how she's she's
Speaker 1: reading the things that the other people are saying, are saying,
Speaker 1: and then she creatures are saying that she's saying, um,
Speaker 1: you know, the Mad Hatter said yeah, And and that's
Speaker 1: always accompanied by a close up of her mouth when
Speaker 1: she describes all those kind of descriptive verbs, things like
Speaker 1: Alice thought, Alice said the red the Mad Hatter yelled.
Speaker 1: You know, whenever one of those, like you know, dialogue
Speaker 1: descriptors is happening, one of those dialogue verbs, it's a
Speaker 1: close up of Alice's mouth kind of kind of saying that.
Speaker 1: But but in addition to that, also that the the
Speaker 1: just the sound design. I've had friends tell me it's
Speaker 1: very cloying, just like the sounds of all the scuttling
Speaker 1: bones scissors chomping away and yeah, all that. We'll, we'll,
Speaker 1: we'll definitely discuss this as we proceed. So at this
Speaker 1: point you might be wondering, Hey, where should I go
Speaker 1: if I want to see this film? Well, you might
Speaker 1: be able to stream this via some of your arts
Speaker 1: and your streaming sources. There. There's so many places to
Speaker 1: stream films these days, I can't even begin to keep
Speaker 1: track of them all, but it looks like you might
Speaker 1: be able to find it on some of those. It
Speaker 1: might also be available to digitally rent or buy, at
Speaker 1: least in some markets the UK, for example, I watched
Speaker 1: it on a risk store Blu ray edition that I
Speaker 1: rented from Video Drome. Here in Atlanta, they also have
Speaker 1: the DVD and just a superb collection of stop motion offering.
Speaker 1: So if you're local to the Atlanta area and are
Speaker 1: interested in films like this, well they've they've got your back.
Speaker 1: All right. Well, let's talk about some of the people
Speaker 1: involved here. Again, they're not not not really a lot
Speaker 1: in terms of cast, but we do have to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about Jan's funk Meyer, the director, writer,
Speaker 1: and production designer for this film. So he was born
Speaker 1: as of this recording is still with us legendary check
Speaker 1: stop motion animator and and I think just general multimedia artist.
Speaker 1: I think one thing to keep in mind, especially with
Speaker 1: this film, and I think this applies to so many
Speaker 1: of his other films as well. It's like, it's not
Speaker 1: just wall to wall stop motion, their whole sequences where
Speaker 1: it's Alice interacting with a strange environment, but there's there's
Speaker 1: not something like crawling across the screen the whole time.
Speaker 1: I guess also we should really state that in this
Speaker 1: stop motion film, Alice is often a human girl interacting
Speaker 1: with stop motion taxidermy and bones. But when she shrinks,
Speaker 1: as people know she often does in the book, she
Speaker 1: turns into quite often a little creepy doll version of herself.
Speaker 1: So sometimes Alice the character is a stop motion doll,
Speaker 1: and sometimes Alice is a full grown human being being
Speaker 1: filmed on a camera, and so so it jumps back
Speaker 1: and forth, it's all over the place, and so sometimes
Speaker 1: it's like puppetry interacting with with the live action Alice.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's a split screen where you see live action
Speaker 1: Alice on one side and stop motion on the other.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's a whole combination of effects and Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's wonderful. You're never fooled by like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: not real Alice, you know, like like it's it's obvious
Speaker 1: when it switches over, but it's it's always perfectly charming
Speaker 1: and believable and like, um, as the Disney animators would say,
Speaker 1: it's the plausible impossible, like everything follows a through line.
Speaker 1: It all makes sense. So sung Bier has been active
Speaker 1: since the mid nineteen sixties and i've and it seems
Speaker 1: to still be active. Uh. Over the course of his career,
Speaker 1: his unique surrealistic style has been highly influential, especially on
Speaker 1: such filmmakers as Terry Gilliam also the Americans stop motion
Speaker 1: duo The Brothers k or Key or Quay. We we
Speaker 1: actually just looked this up to try and get the
Speaker 1: definitive answer, and uh we found it pronounced all three ways.
Speaker 1: So um, my apologies for inevitably getting it wrong twice
Speaker 1: two out three times, but at least he got it
Speaker 1: right once. Yeah, one of those has to be correct. Uh.
Speaker 1: Certainly more familiar with their work than uh, you know,
Speaker 1: interviews with them, but they have a very distinctive style
Speaker 1: that's reminiscent of sync Meyer. Uh. At any rate, all
Speaker 1: all of these individuals have also been highly influential as well,
Speaker 1: of course, So again I think it's not that much
Speaker 1: of a stretch at all to say that most of
Speaker 1: the range of surreal stop motion animation you're finding in
Speaker 1: the world has at least some connection to spank Meyer's
Speaker 1: work or or that general period in world of stop
Speaker 1: motion animation. Some of sink Meyer's most notable works include
Speaker 1: Faust from Little O Tech from two thousand and Surviving
Speaker 1: Life from two thousand ten. His many short films include
Speaker 1: Jabberwockie from seventy one, Leonardo's Diary from seventy two, and
Speaker 1: and Castle of Otranto from ninety seven. So I don't
Speaker 1: know about you step from my own, from my own
Speaker 1: part um, I think I went through a period, this
Speaker 1: is maybe fifteen years ago where I was again into
Speaker 1: strange puppetry and I was getting into stop motion. I
Speaker 1: remember renting numerous discs from the likes of Spec Meyer,
Speaker 1: also Jerry Barta, who was another big name in check
Speaker 1: stop motion, The Brothers, the Brothers k that we just mentioned.
Speaker 1: Um So my memory is a little little faint on
Speaker 1: on all of it, Like some is getting confused about
Speaker 1: which work was directed by which uh individual or duo? UM.
Speaker 1: I know I watched some of Feankmeyer's shorts, and I
Speaker 1: believe I watched two thousands Little Oh Tech. But a
Speaker 1: lot of this kind of blends together. But I know
Speaker 1: that I had never watched Alice, so I've been seeing
Speaker 1: it on the rental shelf for years. Yeah. For for me, um,
Speaker 1: it was all about stop motion growing up. UM. I
Speaker 1: still love stop motion. It's still one of my favorite
Speaker 1: mediums of just filmmaking in general. But you know, as
Speaker 1: you know, I have a big background in um animation
Speaker 1: for film and television, and it's just such a beautiful, expensive,
Speaker 1: time consuming process, and I just I just adore that
Speaker 1: it exists, like like by every standard of like um,
Speaker 1: you know, financial and labor and all these other reasons
Speaker 1: no one should do stop motion, but people want it
Speaker 1: to exist, so people make it exist, you know, And
Speaker 1: and so I really respect that, and uh yeah, that's
Speaker 1: just false in that camp for me, I feel like
Speaker 1: I've seen multiple documentaries where at some point there's the visionary,
Speaker 1: there's the artist who says I want to make a
Speaker 1: full length stop motion film, and someone is telling them, no,
Speaker 1: you really don't want to do this. You should not
Speaker 1: do this. Yeah, it's like you you don't have the money,
Speaker 1: you don't have the time. You know that the audience
Speaker 1: doesn't exist for it. Like, for example, my favorite stop
Speaker 1: motion studio right now, not a surprise, is like they're
Speaker 1: based out of Portland, Oregon. They make wonderful films. Um,
Speaker 1: I'd have to double check to make sure these numbers
Speaker 1: are correct, but at least last time I checked every
Speaker 1: single Like a stop motion film has become less and
Speaker 1: less profitable, has made a smaller profit every single time.
Speaker 1: That's not a way that that you can run a business.
Speaker 1: But they keep doing it, and I thank them for
Speaker 1: that because I love their films, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: I love I just love stop motion. I think it's
Speaker 1: a wonderful process and and it's aesthetics really just appeal
Speaker 1: to me now as as a as a child or
Speaker 1: a young filmmaker yourself. Did you did you do any
Speaker 1: stop motion? Did you make any little experimental films? I did?
Speaker 1: I did? Um. I literally remember the first one I
Speaker 1: ever did, which was with some playto um a camera
Speaker 1: like literally just a camera camera, and um, I think
Speaker 1: it was like a ninja turtle toy and it was
Speaker 1: about a guy getting hit in the head with a
Speaker 1: meteor and so then I had to use it like
Speaker 1: a flipbook and to have it all come together. And
Speaker 1: this is when I was gosh, maybe like seven or eight,
Speaker 1: and it didn't really work. You know, the idea of
Speaker 1: like having the camera like, you know, locked down, did I?
Speaker 1: I did. Didn't understand that yet. And you know how
Speaker 1: many frames you really need to like you know, experience
Speaker 1: uh that that your eye to like see the motion itself,
Speaker 1: twelve frames per second, all that jazz. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: I didn't know any of that. Um. But then when
Speaker 1: I did get into college, and you know, I my
Speaker 1: my my animation studios at my university had like all
Speaker 1: the equipment. Of course, I hopped right on it. One
Speaker 1: of my favorites I ever did. This is kind of
Speaker 1: cheating when it comes to stop motion, but I made
Speaker 1: a short film using a light bright as stop motion,
Speaker 1: which I loved. I thought thought that was it turned
Speaker 1: out so beautifully, it was so much fun to do,
Speaker 1: and um but yeah, yeah, no, I love stop motion
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, people rarely pay me for it because
Speaker 1: people can't afford it. But in my own time, and
Speaker 1: for my own like student films and stuff, I would
Speaker 1: use it all the time. The kids today have it,
Speaker 1: I guess a lot easier to experiment with it because
Speaker 1: I know my my own son has done some stop
Speaker 1: motion experimentation because they have apps that can help with it. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so I've I've seen some of these that he's
Speaker 1: done where there's some sort of like Plato or Lego
Speaker 1: creature crawling around and doing something. You know, isn't it
Speaker 1: not super long? But I was really impressed when I
Speaker 1: saw it. And and who knows, maybe twenty years from
Speaker 1: now he'll be coming to me and saying, Dad, I
Speaker 1: need I need some help financing my feature length stop
Speaker 1: motion animation film. Exactly. We can only hope now. UM.
Speaker 1: I also just want to make a point here again,
Speaker 1: we can't go We could spend a whole, a whole
Speaker 1: lot of time talking about John smenc Meyer uh, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to. I also don't want to want
Speaker 1: to over stress his importance. I don't want to state
Speaker 1: that like he is check stop motion animation because check
Speaker 1: puppetry and uh and subsequently um stop motion animation. And
Speaker 1: this goes back quite a while, and there there are
Speaker 1: other big names in check stop motion summer contemporaries, um
Speaker 1: of spank Meyer. But then you also have some that
Speaker 1: kind of predate him, such as Jerry trunka who nineteen
Speaker 1: twelve through nineteen sixty nine. Who Um. I'm not super
Speaker 1: familiar with his work either, but I know that he
Speaker 1: did a lot of like children's stop motion animated films
Speaker 1: for the check market. All right. As we mentioned, this
Speaker 1: is of course based on the work of Lewis Carroll.
Speaker 1: Lewis Carroll this was the name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson,
Speaker 1: who lived eighteen thirty two through, best remembered for Alice
Speaker 1: in Wonderland from eighteen sixty five, It's sequel Through the
Speaker 1: Looking Glass from eighteen seventy one, and such poems as
Speaker 1: Jabberwocke from eighteen seventy one. His style is often described
Speaker 1: as literary nonsense, but he was also an inventor of games,
Speaker 1: as well as both an academic and recreational mathematician. He
Speaker 1: suffered from migrains, which has often been discussed in connection
Speaker 1: with some of his more hallucinatory ideas, and we actually
Speaker 1: have a migraine aura that is called Alice in Wonderland syndrome.
Speaker 1: The details of his personal life have been subject to
Speaker 1: much speculation and analysis over the years, leading to a
Speaker 1: various darker interpretations of his life and work. We see
Speaker 1: this reflected as well in such films as Night five,
Speaker 1: Dream Child, in which Dodgson is played by Ian Holme.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're gonna get into the cast of this film,
Speaker 1: but it's it's it's not gonna take a lot of time. Alice.
Speaker 1: The physical performance is played by a child actor named
Speaker 1: Christina Quotova. This is her only acting credit, but I
Speaker 1: will say she's quite good in the film. The film
Speaker 1: really ultimately demands a lot of her. She's constantly crawling
Speaker 1: into and through things, interacting with sets and props that
Speaker 1: involved things like broken glass and um, yeah, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna assume everything was was safe. But watching this, you
Speaker 1: do and part of it is like the you know,
Speaker 1: they're very believable fears like oh, don't don't get too
Speaker 1: close to the glass, don't be careful handling that, I
Speaker 1: don't know that that that jar of jam that also
Speaker 1: has thumbtacks in it, things like that. But so she
Speaker 1: often feels slightly imperil without it being like a real
Speaker 1: movie peril feeling. But anyway, she's quite good. I also
Speaker 1: really thought multiple times, like, wow, you've got a great
Speaker 1: like silent actor vibe going, you know, like just pulling
Speaker 1: perfect faces is at perfect moments. Um, just just just
Speaker 1: very believable as this child and also very like I
Speaker 1: guess relatable to like like like she she doesn't feel
Speaker 1: like she's acting despite the fact that the artifice is
Speaker 1: very clear in this film, Like it's it's right up
Speaker 1: front from the first words, which we'll we'll get to later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the way that Alice is betrayed, the way that this
Speaker 1: performance works is that you don't have you don't have
Speaker 1: often in kids films where kid is interacting with some
Speaker 1: sort of a puppet or other um, you know, artificial
Speaker 1: creature or even like some sort of a clown or
Speaker 1: fantastic character, you know, there's sometimes kind of a laughable
Speaker 1: quality to it, like a like an oh shucks kind
Speaker 1: of cuteness to it. But Alice is it's pretty serious
Speaker 1: through most of the film. A lot of time we
Speaker 1: have a lot of these shots of her staring directly
Speaker 1: through the camera's lens at some wondrous site, and she
Speaker 1: has has this very kind of serious look. That's kind
Speaker 1: of this this kid's face that has a lot of
Speaker 1: analysis and suspicion, that kind a face where like you're
Speaker 1: at the supermarket or something and a child is staring
Speaker 1: at you from a from a cart, you know, a
Speaker 1: child you don't know, and they're just looking at you
Speaker 1: like they're they're they're trying to figure you out, but
Speaker 1: they are very suspicious of you. That's well put. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so that too, I think adds to the vibe of
Speaker 1: the film. Now, I think we you watched the English
Speaker 1: language version as well, didn't you? Or did you watch
Speaker 1: a dub version? The version I have is a DVD
Speaker 1: where there are no other language options other than dubbed
Speaker 1: into English with an English actor. That's the only version
Speaker 1: that I have. Okay, that's that seems to be the
Speaker 1: case with the version I watched as well. The voice
Speaker 1: of Alice in this is the voice of Camilla power Born.
Speaker 1: She's an Irish born English actress who appeared in various
Speaker 1: British TV productions over the years, including Whitechapel, Waterloo Road
Speaker 1: and Hornblower Duty. She also appears in the Black Mirror
Speaker 1: episode Shut Up Dance, which was a pretty dark one
Speaker 1: that that that one's really good. One of my favorites
Speaker 1: about Shut Up and Dance is that it's one of
Speaker 1: the few Black Mirror episodes that have nothing um supernatural
Speaker 1: and nothing science fiction about them. That they are it's
Speaker 1: it's all science fact. What happens and Shut Up and
Speaker 1: Dance could happen tomorrow period. You know, it's it's frightening. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The the only thing really speculative about it is sort
Speaker 1: of the I don't know the the how intricate the
Speaker 1: situation is, but that alone doesn't make it unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: The The other interesting thing about Camilla Power is that
Speaker 1: she played Jill Pole in the TV adaptation of C. S.
Speaker 1: Lewis's Narnia book The Silver Chair, alongside Tom Baker who
Speaker 1: played puddle Glom and Warwick Davis who played glim Feather.
Speaker 1: I love these BBC adaptations for the late eighties early nineties.
Speaker 1: Did you watch these two? Yeah? I remember watching these
Speaker 1: like during the middle of summer day on a on
Speaker 1: a PBS channel that we were receiving via antenna. So
Speaker 1: you already have that sort of that that you know,
Speaker 1: that that British TV style that is very much in
Speaker 1: effect in these productions, and then also it was partially
Speaker 1: scrambled via antenna. Yeah. Yeah, now they're they're they're really
Speaker 1: great and um they've actually gotten all for some reason.
Speaker 1: In all the adaptations of the Narnia books, uh, very
Speaker 1: few ever actually finished the series. Most people get one
Speaker 1: or two in then they realize that it's an uphill
Speaker 1: battle for those last few books, they just stop. This
Speaker 1: one got further than most. I think this one got
Speaker 1: at least four maybe five books in so um because
Speaker 1: they combined some stories into one, which which helps with that.
Speaker 1: But uh, yeah, it's it's it's a fun one. If
Speaker 1: anyone's ever looking for like a really corny eighties adaptation, uh,
Speaker 1: look up the BBC Narnia. I guess, I guess they
Speaker 1: called it a mini series back then. They're long, they
Speaker 1: have really like handmade special effects, and the acting is
Speaker 1: very like community theater. It's it's great. Yeah. I remember
Speaker 1: the final battle in the Narni in the Lion, the
Speaker 1: Witch and the Wardrobe, the first one. It has like
Speaker 1: really kind of poorly integrated Uh, it's like traditional animation
Speaker 1: utilized in the battle for some of the creatures. It
Speaker 1: looks like our heroes are just kind of like swatting
Speaker 1: it flies and then yeah, there's just these ghosts which
Speaker 1: aren't really interacting at all, just kind of swirling on screen.
Speaker 1: It's um, it's it's it's great. Yeah. I watched it
Speaker 1: with my my son after we watched the more recent
Speaker 1: Narnia film, which of course is a special effects laden,
Speaker 1: big budget affair, and um, he's still He definitely was like, well,
Speaker 1: this doesn't look quite as real, but but he also
Speaker 1: I think you found it very amusing now that this
Speaker 1: is interesting. Um. The Dutch version of Alice features the
Speaker 1: voice of Harris van Houten as well. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: not the version we watched, but it's notable trivia because
Speaker 1: van Howden is a Dutch actor, probably best known in
Speaker 1: English film for her role as Melissandra in the Game
Speaker 1: of Thrones series. That's pretty amazing. So yeah, I wonder
Speaker 1: how old she was. I I can't do the math
Speaker 1: in my mind, and I refused to, but but yeah
Speaker 1: that that' that would be interesting as well, because because
Speaker 1: she does have such like a kind of matching the
Speaker 1: the physical actor kind of like that sternness as Melissandra.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that that that'd be interesting. To see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because Alice in this film, and I guess like Alice
Speaker 1: traditionally as well, like Atlas, is going to stand up
Speaker 1: to weird, fantastic creatures that are being ridiculous. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: she's not gonna take any crap off of these things. Now,
Speaker 1: Normally at this point we tend to highlight somebody involved
Speaker 1: in the music, but again, there's not really any music
Speaker 1: in this film, at least not for the vast majority
Speaker 1: of it, so there's no credited composer. But I did
Speaker 1: want to at least highlight the sound credits, which go
Speaker 1: to Robert Johnson and Evo Spougege in particular has a
Speaker 1: ton of it's mostly check films, but he also worked
Speaker 1: on a dus Um. Again, I think there were singling
Speaker 1: out because the sound and folly work I thought was
Speaker 1: was pretty incredible. There's a great deal of rooting around
Speaker 1: in this film. Alice is constantly exploring drawers, cramped spaces,
Speaker 1: and strange potentially dangerous objects. Reanimated and decaying taxidermide animals
Speaker 1: are constantly doing the same thing. And so for the
Speaker 1: you know, the whole film, in lieu of music, we
Speaker 1: kind of have this ambient industrial soundscape of noises that
Speaker 1: all there reminded me a lot of the Folly Work
Speaker 1: and Planet of the Vampires. There's something kind of almost
Speaker 1: hypnotic about it. There's almost kind of an A S. M. R. Effect.
Speaker 1: At least that's the way I felt listening to these
Speaker 1: various sound effects. Yeah, it's like what's happening on the screen.
Speaker 1: Not only are you hearing the sound, but the sound
Speaker 1: is like almost within you. It's like right around you.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's much louder than it should be in
Speaker 1: a realistic adaptation of what's happening on screen. But but no, no,
Speaker 1: it works perfectly because it is not only is it
Speaker 1: so important to a story with very little dialogue and
Speaker 1: no music, but it's so important because these extra i'll
Speaker 1: call them heightened noises match the heightened visuals perfectly. Like um,
Speaker 1: but like when these scissors clank, it is a rusty, dirty,
Speaker 1: loud pair of scissors on screen and in your ear
Speaker 1: that that they match. Yeah, it definitely helps bring the
Speaker 1: visuals to life. And I was also thinking about how
Speaker 1: it's interesting that we have a film with again creatures
Speaker 1: and things and sights and sets that that one might
Speaker 1: be attempted to interprets creepy or even scary, But the
Speaker 1: sounds in the film, the soundscape doesn't push you in
Speaker 1: either direction. Like you could imagine a version of this
Speaker 1: film where you have like ridiculous, cute, disarming music to
Speaker 1: sort of say, hey, this white rabbit, it's not creepy,
Speaker 1: listen because listen to the music. Or the other side
Speaker 1: of that, of course, is really like, you know, turn
Speaker 1: the wheel in the direction of the dark and have
Speaker 1: something some creepy sound effects that make everything seem creepier
Speaker 1: than they are. Instead, no, the the visuals are kind
Speaker 1: of uh, you know, left um unaugmented by music, and
Speaker 1: you're I guess you're more inclined to sort of take
Speaker 1: them at face value and also see them more purely
Speaker 1: through the lens of how Alice interacts with them. And
Speaker 1: I think it matches the subject matter and especially this
Speaker 1: adaptation of the subject matter, very well, because I mean, ultimately,
Speaker 1: the story of Alice in Wonderland is an internal story.
Speaker 1: It's one individual girl, a lot of internal dialogue, a
Speaker 1: lot a lot of running monologue with her, and it's
Speaker 1: what she thinks, what she feels. It's all very internal
Speaker 1: and in this adaptation, it's all also taking place more
Speaker 1: or less in a single household. Therefore, it is it
Speaker 1: does feel like an abandoned child old thinking to herself.
Speaker 1: And if that's if that's the case, you don't have score.
Speaker 1: It is a child thinking up everything by herself. That
Speaker 1: it feels more accurately lonely to have no score. And
Speaker 1: these heightens, you know, very imaginative sound effects. We mentioned
Speaker 1: already that in these these bits of narration where Alice
Speaker 1: says something like the Mad Hatter said, or Alice thought
Speaker 1: to herself, we see her her lips, her mouth moving.
Speaker 1: And I don't know how much of this is a
Speaker 1: product of like remastered film, uh, but but I think
Speaker 1: this was intentional. Surely the lips are a little bit chapped,
Speaker 1: the teeth are of course their children's teeth, as they're
Speaker 1: a little bit crooked, they're they're a little bit stained.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that kind of matches up with
Speaker 1: this this idea that you just mentioned of like, um,
Speaker 1: almost a wild child, a child that is that has
Speaker 1: maybe not had as much parental uh supervision and attention
Speaker 1: and therefore is retreating more into the imagined world. That
Speaker 1: this is just purely anecdotal connections in my mind. But um,
Speaker 1: there's this episode of Breaking Bad where Jesse is like
Speaker 1: trying to be a tough guy. So he's gonna go
Speaker 1: get his money that he's owed by so and so
Speaker 1: blah blah blah. And when he gets there, there's this heartbreaking,
Speaker 1: you know, little child who lives in squalor. And it's
Speaker 1: just this, this this little boy is just by himself
Speaker 1: making do with you know, no resources in a filthy
Speaker 1: like hovel of a home. That's what it reminds me of.
Speaker 1: With Alice, there is in many ways it does feel
Speaker 1: like an abandoned child just making do with what she has. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that that that's not too belittle this, this poor
Speaker 1: fictional child in Breaking Bad. My heart goes out for
Speaker 1: that poor fictional child. All right, well, let's let's get
Speaker 1: into the plot of Alice. So to begin with, Um,
Speaker 1: this story begins just like the book does. And and
Speaker 1: I guess I'll say in advance that basically the adaptation
Speaker 1: is very close to the source material. There there are
Speaker 1: big chunks that have been exercised and are just moved
Speaker 1: without even mentioning that they've been removed. But for the
Speaker 1: most part, if it happened in the book, it's adaptation
Speaker 1: on screen is pretty similar. Obviously, the circumstances in which
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, adapted, are very different. You know
Speaker 1: that there is no real world other than what happens
Speaker 1: in this one kind of run down house. But but
Speaker 1: but it's it's pretty accurate for one to one. So
Speaker 1: the as the book begins, so do we. We begin
Speaker 1: with Alice and her sister sitting along the river bank.
Speaker 1: The sister is reading a book and Alice has a
Speaker 1: bunch of rocks in her lap and she's throwing them
Speaker 1: into the river one by one. I liked the detail,
Speaker 1: and this made even more sense later when I was
Speaker 1: reminded of some of the plot elements. But the sister's
Speaker 1: face or head is never seen. We see her from
Speaker 1: the She's just from the neck down, which which I
Speaker 1: thought was nice because there's the sense like there's no
Speaker 1: attention there for Alice. This is not someone who's regarding
Speaker 1: Alice really as a as as a as a as
Speaker 1: a human being, or or or or anything. But then
Speaker 1: also of we have the whole off with their head
Speaker 1: thing later, which perhaps reflects this as well. So keep
Speaker 1: this scene in mind, listeners, will We'll be back to
Speaker 1: it in just a moment. But so my first thoughts
Speaker 1: are that this is a very age appropriate Alice, which
Speaker 1: I appreciate quite often Alice is depicted as quite a
Speaker 1: bit older, which you know, I mean, we all have
Speaker 1: childlike wonder in our lives. But I think the big
Speaker 1: point with the Alice story is that she is literally
Speaker 1: a child making do with a child's logic. And you know,
Speaker 1: I mean like I've seen adaptations where, like, you know,
Speaker 1: an adult Kate Beck and Sale is playing Alice, which
Speaker 1: is fun at all, but it just it's it's not
Speaker 1: quite the same, you know what, When it's a legitimate
Speaker 1: child child, I just think the story works better. And uh,
Speaker 1: I also like that this this child isn't like cutesie precocious.
Speaker 1: She's kind of bratty and kind of just like selfish
Speaker 1: and like a fun realistic way, like she feels like
Speaker 1: a real child. So in this, you know, selfish brady
Speaker 1: kind of a point of view. Are are our hero?
Speaker 1: Alice is just reaching over starts playing with her sister's book,
Speaker 1: just kind of like flipping the pages like a flip book,
Speaker 1: and her sister reaches over and slaps her hand immediately
Speaker 1: we get our first close up of Alice's mouth as
Speaker 1: she says Alice thought to herself, and then we cut
Speaker 1: to Alice as the title screen. Uh. Now we go
Speaker 1: back to the Alice mouth and now here here's what
Speaker 1: she says, which is just a wonderful way to start
Speaker 1: a film. Alice thought to herself, Now you will see
Speaker 1: a film. And this just breaks the fourth wall immediately,
Speaker 1: letting us all know that we're all on the same
Speaker 1: page here. And uh, then these more title cards just
Speaker 1: kind of interrupt Alice's speech as she's talking, and then
Speaker 1: she says made for children perhaps, but I nearly forgot.
Speaker 1: You must close your eyes otherwise you won't see anything.
Speaker 1: Great way to set up this story, keeping it kind
Speaker 1: of non sensical, um, making sure that we know that
Speaker 1: everyone's on board with being fantasy. That you get it.
Speaker 1: It turned out great. Oh yeah, and as we mentioned
Speaker 1: this internal dialogue verb description, it will continue for the
Speaker 1: entire film, So anytime someone says or thinks or does anything,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's it's coupled with Alice's close up mouth
Speaker 1: saying Alice thought, Alice said, etcetera. And it Uh. I
Speaker 1: liked how it gave it a formal, almost ritualistic air,
Speaker 1: you know, like, um, you know, I get some sort
Speaker 1: of religious right that's taking place here, I guess it.
Speaker 1: It also reminded me of refrains from works like you know,
Speaker 1: quote The Raven Nevermore, that sort of thing, And it's
Speaker 1: a great way to interpret. Like I said, what is
Speaker 1: a very internal story. How how do you do that
Speaker 1: without just simple voice you know, voice over, which is
Speaker 1: kind of kind of the standard option. In fact, I
Speaker 1: remember back when UM Walt Disney did their very famous
Speaker 1: adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. When they initially released it
Speaker 1: to theaters, it failed, It was not as successful as
Speaker 1: they wanted it to be. And when asked about it,
Speaker 1: Walt Disney said, oh, well, it's too much of an
Speaker 1: internal story. And he said it's also he also, I
Speaker 1: think blamed Alice's lack of like proactive action taking. But
Speaker 1: but ultimately it is despite the fact that is it's
Speaker 1: adapted perpetually. It is kind of a hard thing to
Speaker 1: adapt the internal monologue of of of this child, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: how do you how do you make or feel like
Speaker 1: a full fledged character and not just this um, you know,
Speaker 1: agentless observer of weird things, especially as most filmmakers consider
Speaker 1: a voice over to be a lazy way. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's telling, not showing. So that's that's that's tough.
Speaker 1: So so now remember where we were. She was sitting
Speaker 1: on the river banks with her sister. These opening credits
Speaker 1: happened real quick, and now boom, Alice is now indoors.
Speaker 1: We see some quick establishing shots panning around the room
Speaker 1: at you know, it's decrepit nature, discarded apple cores, peeling wallpaper,
Speaker 1: chip paint, old mouse traps. Uh. And then we see
Speaker 1: these two very frightening old dolls sitting side by side,
Speaker 1: and one of the dolls has a lap full of rocks,
Speaker 1: which now Alice is is picking up from the dolls
Speaker 1: lap and tossing into a half drunk teacup. So there
Speaker 1: we go, even this nice gentle opening of of of
Speaker 1: river banks and sisters reading. No, it's just Alice by
Speaker 1: herself with two dolls being alone, just just not really.
Speaker 1: Just get used to it, folks, where we're gonna have
Speaker 1: a lot of Alice by herself using her imagination. So uh,
Speaker 1: the only sound we were hearing right now is a
Speaker 1: loud ticket clock and it's just Alice sitting by herself
Speaker 1: until until suddenly we hear a creaking off screen, so
Speaker 1: Alice looks up to see what what what that sound is,
Speaker 1: and there is a taxidermied white rabbit in sort of
Speaker 1: like a glass diorama type situation with like you know,
Speaker 1: it's scientific name labeled and all that stuff what you
Speaker 1: would find in a museum or collector's home. And this
Speaker 1: rabbit is has come to life and is struggling against
Speaker 1: the nails holding it in position inside this class diorama. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: this scene is just fabulous. This is the one where
Speaker 1: after I finished the film, I had to go back
Speaker 1: and rewatch this film immediately because it's just so good
Speaker 1: with like the every detail of this rabbit, from the
Speaker 1: eyes to its you know, protruding teeth, to the the
Speaker 1: way the way it deals with those little nails stuck
Speaker 1: through its hand. And also again I'll probably drive this
Speaker 1: home multiple times, but this scene is not as creepy
Speaker 1: as as it may sound when we're just describing it.
Speaker 1: There's a lot more whimsy and humor to it. And
Speaker 1: when we refer to these taxidermied creatures, none of them
Speaker 1: are done very well they all have that uncanny look
Speaker 1: of something that's been poorly taxidermied. So keep that in
Speaker 1: mind if you haven't seen this, like really bugged out
Speaker 1: glass eyes. Yeah, too much, too much view, like the
Speaker 1: teeth or to expose. Uh, most of them I think
Speaker 1: are also visually falling apart, like they're stuffing coming out
Speaker 1: of them and so forth. So, so the white rabbit
Speaker 1: is struggling, struggling, struggling. He finally gets free, uh, and
Speaker 1: he pulls up, revealing two giant nails protruding from each palm.
Speaker 1: So it reaches up with its giant rabbit teeth, bites
Speaker 1: off the nails and spits them to the floor. And
Speaker 1: then it pulls a drawer of clothing up from the
Speaker 1: ground inside of the diorama. So already starting with that
Speaker 1: that like you know, mythical Oh it's larger on the inside,
Speaker 1: kind of lodge now. Uh. It then gets dressed from
Speaker 1: the clothing inside of the drawer. It takes a large
Speaker 1: pair of scissors out of the drawer and then breaks
Speaker 1: the surrounding glass at the diorama to make an escape.
Speaker 1: And this scene, too is just the stop motion work
Speaker 1: is tremendous, and the and the fantasy of the whole
Speaker 1: thing is also splendid, Like all the details of like
Speaker 1: pulling on the gloves, I love because you can you
Speaker 1: clearly see it has it's it's a taxidermy rabbit, so
Speaker 1: it has rabbits appendages. But as the glove comes on,
Speaker 1: and the glove is is stretched fully on, it's able
Speaker 1: to then flex all the little fingers in the gloved hand.
Speaker 1: And just every detail in this is so beautifully rendered.
Speaker 1: Now no one calamity that has occurred, uh, will repeat
Speaker 1: throughout the throughout the film. Is that in his attempts
Speaker 1: to escape the this white rabbit has torn a little uh,
Speaker 1: I guess, just a little fissure. I I don't know
Speaker 1: what to call it. He's got a little hole now
Speaker 1: worn in his chest which is leaking um sawdust. That
Speaker 1: this this will repeat many many times. That there are
Speaker 1: a few repeating gags. That's one of them, for sure.
Speaker 1: Another one which I won't draw too much attention to,
Speaker 1: but is is funny. Every time Alice tries to open
Speaker 1: a drawer, the knob falls off. It's pointless, doesn't really
Speaker 1: advance the story. It just contributes to our our character,
Speaker 1: Alice falling on the ground often yeah, uh so, So
Speaker 1: we get our first um oh dear, oh dear, I
Speaker 1: shall be late from the white rabbit, but it's voiced
Speaker 1: by Alice, and then once again we are treated to
Speaker 1: another up close mouth shots of her explaining the white
Speaker 1: rabbit said. The rabbit then runs off, and now the
Speaker 1: room has magically expanded and we are now outdoors in
Speaker 1: a giant, craggy dirt field with just a little uh
Speaker 1: desk drawer sitting right in the middle. She goes up
Speaker 1: to it, tries to take off the drawer. Of course,
Speaker 1: the knob falls off, she falls down, She pries it open,
Speaker 1: and then crawls through the drawer, once again showing that
Speaker 1: we are in a mythical, magical world at this point.
Speaker 1: If you're familiar with the Alice in Wonderland story, you
Speaker 1: can more or less tell where we're headed at this point.
Speaker 1: We're headed towards the Alice falling down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: This whole scene kind of just mirrors that. We next
Speaker 1: see the white rabbit eating a bowl full of sawdust,
Speaker 1: presumably replenishing what has leaked out, But he has not
Speaker 1: yet sown closed the the chest wound, so the sawdust
Speaker 1: just keeps pouring out as he eats it. Again, not
Speaker 1: as creepy as it sounds, but you know, he's in
Speaker 1: a hurry. He doesn't have time to just stop and
Speaker 1: and and and pay a lot of attention to this
Speaker 1: gaping hole in his chest. Better to just have a
Speaker 1: quick snack of sawdust and then keep moving. He also
Speaker 1: stores his pocket watch in this hole in his chest,
Speaker 1: so every time he takes it out, he has to
Speaker 1: lick the sawdust off the front glass of his pocket watch. Yes,
Speaker 1: white rabbit runs off, and then so Alice passes by
Speaker 1: the sawdust and I'll try that. She has a couple
Speaker 1: of bites singing up. I don't like it, yeah her again.
Speaker 1: Her childlike curiosity kind of gets her into trouble at times,
Speaker 1: and he seemed to like it. Yeah, I like the
Speaker 1: rabbit is eating. I'm gonna try it. Or this looks
Speaker 1: like jam, of course, I'm going to try and see
Speaker 1: what it tastes like. So Alice then pulls a classic
Speaker 1: sideshow bob move. She steps on an upturned rake. It
Speaker 1: flings up and hits her in the face, and then
Speaker 1: she falls backwards into a cooking pot, which then turns
Speaker 1: into a portal which she then falls through, and we're
Speaker 1: now in uh absolutely a a descending elevator scene which
Speaker 1: very closely mirrors the followed down a rabbit hole. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the one. Whether it's like she's going down
Speaker 1: and they're all these just shelves of of things, right Like,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of it looks like like very old
Speaker 1: preserved foods, but also maybe preserve specimens, and then also
Speaker 1: jars of like random dangerous looking crafting supplies. And then
Speaker 1: sometimes there's a merger of the two, like you see
Speaker 1: more than once in this film. You see what looks
Speaker 1: like like bread like bagats or or and so forth
Speaker 1: that have like nails emerging from them, or tax stuck
Speaker 1: in that stuck in them. And this is where we
Speaker 1: get something you mentioned before, which is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite I supposed to give Joe Credit a rub the
Speaker 1: fir moment Alice is descending in this elevator, she reaches
Speaker 1: out and she grabs just a jar of marmalade off
Speaker 1: a shelf as she passes, as she does in the
Speaker 1: book as well, but unlike the book, she she examines
Speaker 1: it and it's a jar of marmalade with a saran
Speaker 1: wrap top. She takes her finger and all of this
Speaker 1: is the sound design is wonderful, which takes her finger
Speaker 1: punctures the suran rap brings up a big finger full
Speaker 1: of the marmalade, and there's a giant thumbtack on her
Speaker 1: finger and it's just like wow, Like the the feelings
Speaker 1: that you get from seeing this and and hearing this
Speaker 1: is just out of this world. So so yeah, she
Speaker 1: doesn't want this. Thankfully, she does not eat the thumb
Speaker 1: tac what are the few things she doesn't eat? And
Speaker 1: then she puts it back on the shelf and we
Speaker 1: can continue with our story. And this of course leads
Speaker 1: to the the big hall of Doors scene where you know,
Speaker 1: there's a key on a table and you know, she
Speaker 1: she's first figuring out that she can be too big
Speaker 1: and too small to eat me, drink me all that stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: like we mentioned, uh, when she does change into a
Speaker 1: a small character, you know, like like it's often shown
Speaker 1: in the book, she turns into a creepy old doll
Speaker 1: with with stop motion stuff. But instead of a little
Speaker 1: you know, cherry cordial or whatever it is that that
Speaker 1: is the drink that she drinks, it's a bottle of ink.
Speaker 1: She just pops that cork drinks it down like I
Speaker 1: she first she tests it, she dips her finger in
Speaker 1: like said, oh, this is fine, and then she drinks
Speaker 1: it so yeah that the drinking the bottle of ink
Speaker 1: makes her shrink. Then she's gonna wants to go through
Speaker 1: this beautiful door to get to the big, beautiful garden
Speaker 1: like from the book. But of course in this adaptation,
Speaker 1: there is no beautiful garden. It's like a very small,
Speaker 1: like almost like doll house exterior, kind of like it's
Speaker 1: it's like a tiny little stage play diorama, that's what
Speaker 1: it looks like. But she sees the white rabbits and
Speaker 1: there she wants to go there too. She doesn't have
Speaker 1: the key, darnet now and you get big And then
Speaker 1: this is one of the first appearances of these very
Speaker 1: creepy looking cakes that the traditional eat meat cake. And
Speaker 1: I can't tell what it is. It looks kind of
Speaker 1: like minced meat, maybe caviare What did you think it was, Robert, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got kind of it's weird because on one, it
Speaker 1: doesn't look inedible to me. Uh, it looks like maybe
Speaker 1: there's some sort of a mincemeat or um or some
Speaker 1: sort of very brown, very type of thing, you know,
Speaker 1: going on maybe ground dates. But then there's something on
Speaker 1: top that I guess is a like a sliver of
Speaker 1: a nut or something, perhaps, yeah, some sort of seed,
Speaker 1: but it also kind of looks like a tooth, yes,
Speaker 1: and it makes it look very strange. Yeah, But she
Speaker 1: eats it, and of course she grows big. Now she
Speaker 1: can reach the key, but now she's too big to
Speaker 1: go through the door, etcetera, etcetera. Y'all know this story.
Speaker 1: But she starts to cry, and now she has cried
Speaker 1: an entire ocean. Uh she she she shrinks down a
Speaker 1: bit again. And now here's here's here's here's a wonderful part.
Speaker 1: I absolutely love this if you know the book. Next up,
Speaker 1: we get a mouse swim by in this giant ocean
Speaker 1: of tears. Now this, this mouse has decided it's time
Speaker 1: to rest, you know, trying to make some lunch. So
Speaker 1: it goes up to this island that it sees, which
Speaker 1: is Alice's head bobbing in the water. Not even like
Speaker 1: discreetly bobbing, it's just a child's head. But no, no, no,
Speaker 1: the mouse crawls upon top, hammers steaks into her head
Speaker 1: and then sets up a hole. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: a step by step process of this mouse setting up
Speaker 1: a campfire, uh, setting up a meal, opening cans with
Speaker 1: a tiny little can opener, dropping its little like cooking
Speaker 1: pot into the water, and bringing it up with a rope.
Speaker 1: And Alice is just kind of watching, kind of bufuddled,
Speaker 1: kind of curious this whole time. And then and then
Speaker 1: the mouse reaches down with a little scythe and it
Speaker 1: cuts some hair off from Alice's head, and it's about
Speaker 1: to prepare a fire to cook its food on top
Speaker 1: of Alice's head. And this is when Alice goes, now
Speaker 1: that's too far. Yeah, I mean she dunks in. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everything else was fine, hammering steaks into my head and
Speaker 1: all that's fine. But no, no, no, you're not starting
Speaker 1: a fire with my hair. Please? Now was this base?
Speaker 1: Was this particular part from the book? It is, except
Speaker 1: it did not happen on top of her head. Basically,
Speaker 1: she was in the Ocean of Tears. She was lost,
Speaker 1: swimming swimming, and a creature swims by and she thinks, oh,
Speaker 1: it's quite large. It must be like a dog or
Speaker 1: a giant bear or something. And then she realizes it's
Speaker 1: a mouse, and she's like, oh, I must be very small.
Speaker 1: Then the mouse guides her and this leads to the
Speaker 1: caucus race scene in the book, where it's basically the
Speaker 1: mouse explains what it's like to be a mouse, why
Speaker 1: it's trouble, etcetera, etcetera. But so so he skips some
Speaker 1: of that. But yeah, yeah, the mouse making an island
Speaker 1: and cooking on her head is not from from the book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the steaks being your scalp boy, that was a real
Speaker 1: That was one of the many moments in the film
Speaker 1: where I was yelping a little bit. Even though she's
Speaker 1: she's she takes it in stride, she's not in terror
Speaker 1: or anything. But I was like, uh, so, the the
Speaker 1: rabbits is now seen in this ocean after she has
Speaker 1: scared off the mouse. He's in a little rowboat, he's
Speaker 1: got some cakes with him, etcetera. If you've never read
Speaker 1: this story before, the whole book is her chasing this
Speaker 1: white rabbit. It is this mcguffin that she has chosen
Speaker 1: in her childlike mind that this is the goal. I
Speaker 1: need to follow this white rabbit wherever it goes. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you all know that already. Um, But when she
Speaker 1: sees the rabbit. The rabbit accidentally just like rows its
Speaker 1: boat directly into her, and he drops a plate of
Speaker 1: these cakes again, these weird dark brown, sticky seed toothcakes.
Speaker 1: She eats one, she shrinks way down and then you
Speaker 1: know it's it's it's it just it just continues from there.
Speaker 1: Suddenly we are we are in a new scene. She's
Speaker 1: come up on the shore and she finally gets out
Speaker 1: that door and gets to where she's going. Now the
Speaker 1: white rabbit, just like in the book, sees her and goes, hey,
Speaker 1: Mary Anne, because because the white rabbit has confused her
Speaker 1: for the servants, now that she has shrunk down to
Speaker 1: his his height. Uh now in the book, he goes,
Speaker 1: please get me my fan and gloves. But no, no,
Speaker 1: this is a much scarier adaptation. Go fed me a
Speaker 1: new pair of scissors because he lost his during the
Speaker 1: the Ocean of Tears seen. So she does, and oh no,
Speaker 1: this this house, it's it's a bit like a house
Speaker 1: of blocks that that on on the exterior, very beautiful.
Speaker 1: Everything will be made of just things found around the
Speaker 1: house throughout this whole story. But um, inside the house
Speaker 1: are just weird skeleton monstrosities. Um like I guess these
Speaker 1: aren't really in the house. They're mostly around the exterior.
Speaker 1: But there are fish heads with big goggly taxes, dr
Speaker 1: me eyes and little feet from another creature. There's like
Speaker 1: a taxidermied alligator with giant rodent skulls instead of alligator schools.
Speaker 1: These are all the um uh, if we're again, if
Speaker 1: we're looking to the books, these are the other servants
Speaker 1: that work for the White Rabbit. There's a bill, a handyman.
Speaker 1: There's a few others of some guinea pigs, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a fabulous, fabulous sequence where we basically get
Speaker 1: a siege scene. Alice is inside the toy house and
Speaker 1: the White Rabbit and the various reanimated minions of the
Speaker 1: White Rabbit are trying to get inside, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of wonderful, strange stuff that happens, like at one point,
Speaker 1: the white rabbits climbing up a ladder with a with
Speaker 1: a saw and acts like he's gonna I guess I'll
Speaker 1: saw her arm off, and she's like, no get away,
Speaker 1: and she's wats him down and he falls through a
Speaker 1: plate of glass. It's just wonderful. Of course, Alice is
Speaker 1: changing in size perpetually throughout this scene as she is
Speaker 1: want to do so. So the siege continues, and Rabbit
Speaker 1: officially sends up a bill um. In the books, he
Speaker 1: is a lizard. In our adaptation, he is an alligator
Speaker 1: with a rodent skull, and to climb up the roof
Speaker 1: and go down the chimney. Alice shooes him away. He
Speaker 1: falls and gets hurt. And then this is just an
Speaker 1: odd little, you know, tableau that we see here. Can
Speaker 1: you describe it? Rob Oh? Yeah? They so he gets
Speaker 1: the gator eat your bill here, gets his torso ripped
Speaker 1: open a bit, and of course sawdust comes out, spills out,
Speaker 1: and so the all the animals stop the siege. Mint
Speaker 1: for a minute. They stopped the siege, and they starts
Speaker 1: like trying to re stuff him, to revive him. At
Speaker 1: one point they have a uh, they have like a
Speaker 1: funnel in his mouth and they're pouring sawdust in it.
Speaker 1: You know, gotta gotta try and and resuscitate him here.
Speaker 1: But it's a prolonged sequence. It also feels like semi
Speaker 1: religious because maybe it's sort of the way that the
Speaker 1: bill is laid across the white Rabbit's knee I think
Speaker 1: kind of like Mary holding the body of Christ after
Speaker 1: the crucifixion. Yeah, no, I I thought the same things.
Speaker 1: And yeah, it's it's very sweet and very strange the
Speaker 1: whole time. But but I love a couple of little
Speaker 1: animation choices, like, for example, when Bill is stretched out
Speaker 1: being being fed the news sawdust and having his stomach
Speaker 1: stitched up, we see Bill's skeleton eyes blink several times,
Speaker 1: communicating to us the viewer, Oh, Bill's fine. This isn't
Speaker 1: like a grotesque stitching up of a dead creature. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: this is live. Bill is fine, and he's just being
Speaker 1: helped by the White rabbits. Yeah. So many little little
Speaker 1: touches like that that add that little element of whimsy
Speaker 1: that keeps the sequence from straying too far into like
Speaker 1: the weird and potentially dark, keeping it within that realm
Speaker 1: of wonder. So Alice at this current moment is now
Speaker 1: in her shrunken doll state. She has escaped to the
Speaker 1: White Rabbit's house, and now she is running away from
Speaker 1: this gang of skeleton monsters. Uh. In this pursuit, she
Speaker 1: falls into a vat of I'm gonna call it milk,
Speaker 1: but it's a milk like substance, whatever it may be.
Speaker 1: And immediately she regrows to her full human height, but
Speaker 1: oddly and amazingly, she has an incredibly creepy doll mask
Speaker 1: over her human face, which is just shocking to see. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you see her eyes, her her human eyes staring out
Speaker 1: of it. So it's this, it's like a costume doll
Speaker 1: death mask. And then we get we get this scene
Speaker 1: where it what it what it falls down into the
Speaker 1: or they what they kind of intumbate within a closet, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because when she grows up into this doll creature whatever
Speaker 1: it is that she turned into, inexplicably she's fully paralyzed.
Speaker 1: So this skeleton gang has the opportunity to kind of
Speaker 1: um oh Guliver's travel style knock over. The giants tie
Speaker 1: her up and drag her, and they lock her in
Speaker 1: a closet. Why most of this is happening, I don't know,
Speaker 1: but it makes sense. You see a monster, you lock
Speaker 1: it up in the closet. But then she emerges, she
Speaker 1: breaks out of this thing, and uh, and it's another
Speaker 1: great sequence because of course she's dressed inside the sarcophagus,
Speaker 1: She's dressed like the certain the doll on the outside
Speaker 1: of the sarcophagus. So it's it's really weird. It's so strange.
Speaker 1: Just yeah, it's like she was a cocoon and her
Speaker 1: exterior was her, but now she's inside of her, crawling
Speaker 1: out of her. It's beautifully done. Very strange. What one
Speaker 1: one of the otter shots in this whole thing. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: now that she's locked in the closet, she looks around
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what she can do to to
Speaker 1: perhaps get out or just hey where am i? And
Speaker 1: she sees a lot of strange things. Uh. There are
Speaker 1: a bunch of look like chickens eggs, but when they hatch,
Speaker 1: these little eggs are are bringing forth exclusively skulls, and
Speaker 1: they crawl around and chomp around a bit. It's beautiful. Uh.
Speaker 1: We see some of that nail bread and we can
Speaker 1: see some stop motion bread that she picks up, uh,
Speaker 1: like growing nails, which is beautiful. She'll open a can
Speaker 1: with a can opener and it'll be full of cockroaches.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's full of giant cockroaches. That was as
Speaker 1: a bit much. Then there'll be a jar with a
Speaker 1: raw meats tongue just kind of flopping about the raw
Speaker 1: meats animation is some of the more grotesque in this thing.
Speaker 1: And yet and yet it's it's not like attacking or
Speaker 1: threatening and just kind of doing its own going about
Speaker 1: its own business. So it's not as weird as the
Speaker 1: I think there's a crawling steak scene and Poultergeist, if
Speaker 1: memory serves right, Yeah, it's it's it's whimsical still, And
Speaker 1: ultimately she finds a sardine can, opens it up with
Speaker 1: exerdine can opener, and there's a key inside. Good, you know,
Speaker 1: So this is what she's been rooting around for. Apparently
Speaker 1: she knew there was a key here somewhere. She's found it,
Speaker 1: and I love how she quite unnecessarily once she removes
Speaker 1: the key from the sardine can, it's dripping with oil
Speaker 1: or water probably I'm I'm assuming sardine oil is dripping
Speaker 1: from that key before she sticks it in the door
Speaker 1: to try it out, though, she licks it and she
Speaker 1: kind of makes a face like, look that tasted a
Speaker 1: little gross, and I was like, nobody told you to
Speaker 1: do that, Alice, why don't you the key? Very believable
Speaker 1: child moment. Yeah, let's see so Alice then then exits
Speaker 1: the closet and just continues to search for this white rabbit.
Speaker 1: She's going from room to room trying to find things.
Speaker 1: She enters a room with these giant holes just board
Speaker 1: through the wooden floorboards, just peppering all over the floor,
Speaker 1: as if a rodent, you know, a giant rodent has
Speaker 1: dug them out, or like like giant cartoonish termites. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then we see socks burrowing and undulating through the
Speaker 1: holes as if they're like a sea serpent or worm,
Speaker 1: and it's it's wild. Yeah. I was a little afraid
Speaker 1: that we were going to see underneath those socks and
Speaker 1: there's gonna be some sort of hideous worm creature, but
Speaker 1: it's ultimately revealed. I guess that they're full of air
Speaker 1: or nothing at all, because there's a scene where she
Speaker 1: inflates a sock and then it crawls off like a worm.
Speaker 1: It's true. I appreciates that, Um, a sock moving like
Speaker 1: a worm is as gross as it gets there. There
Speaker 1: is there is no extra skeleton inside or anything. And
Speaker 1: then this is actually one of my favorite moments because
Speaker 1: because I would say, this whole movie, you're basically just
Speaker 1: like waiting for like, oh, how are they going to
Speaker 1: do this scene like like like like what what what
Speaker 1: elements from just sitting around an old dilapidated house are
Speaker 1: you going to cobble together to create this scene? And
Speaker 1: that this one, to me, I think is one of
Speaker 1: the more successful and one of the creepier. Uh so
Speaker 1: uh one of these socks, a pair of dentures and
Speaker 1: a couple of taxidermy eyes kind of cobble themselves together
Speaker 1: and they become the famous caterpillar from the Alice in Wonderland,
Speaker 1: and it sits on a darning block. I don't know
Speaker 1: if most people knows what these are. Basically, if you're
Speaker 1: trying to fix a sock, you put like the sock
Speaker 1: over like these like wooden kind of like shape that
Speaker 1: way it's stretched out and you can like sew it's
Speaker 1: shut to to repair a sock. So yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of shaped like a mushroom. So the darning block
Speaker 1: kind of sits up like a mushroom and then the
Speaker 1: sock sits on top of it to be like, ah,
Speaker 1: you know, hello, Alice, let's have our dialogue. I'm glad
Speaker 1: you explained this because I I had no idea what
Speaker 1: this object was other than oh, it looks like a
Speaker 1: wooden mushroom, and then of course it serves as the
Speaker 1: mushroom for this tableau for the caterpillar. But I had
Speaker 1: no idea that that's this is object had a practical
Speaker 1: real world application. Yeah, yes, yeah, if the listeners don't
Speaker 1: know what I'm talking about. Picture kind of like a
Speaker 1: door knob, but made of wood and looking like a mushroom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a darning block for for sewing socks. So,
Speaker 1: as we know in the story next up, the caterpillar
Speaker 1: tells her that one side will make her grow larger,
Speaker 1: one side might could grow smaller. Now of the books
Speaker 1: and other adaptations, this is just a mushroom, so you
Speaker 1: can just pull us pull a little bit off. But no, no, no,
Speaker 1: this is a piece of wood. So Alice gets out
Speaker 1: her her scissors and big loud chomp chomp on each
Speaker 1: side cuts off these little I guess uh, an exaggerated splinter,
Speaker 1: a hunk of wood, something around the sides of like
Speaker 1: a pencil, maybe smaller than that, like a golf pencil
Speaker 1: worth of of, like a wooden splinter. So then that
Speaker 1: the caterpillar goes to sleep by sewing its eyes shut
Speaker 1: with a needle and thread, and then we continue Alice
Speaker 1: uh takes a couple of steps outside and she wants
Speaker 1: to test these mushroom bits a k a. Giant splinters
Speaker 1: of wood, so she takes a little bite of one,
Speaker 1: and this I think is one of the more beautiful
Speaker 1: adaptations of her growing and shrinking. What it does is
Speaker 1: instead of the character Alice getting large and small, which
Speaker 1: we've seen many times. At this point, there are a
Speaker 1: bunch of trees sitting in like little Christmas tree stands outside,
Speaker 1: and when she takes a bite of one, we see
Speaker 1: them all shoot to the sky or shrink all the
Speaker 1: way down to saplings. And this is her doing a
Speaker 1: little trial and air to see which piece of mushroom
Speaker 1: makes her big and which which piece makes her small.
Speaker 1: And so there now she has a solution to this
Speaker 1: our Our next scene is with the Duchess. Alice is
Speaker 1: walking and she sees a taxidermied fish and it's a
Speaker 1: there to deliver a letter, and as we find out,
Speaker 1: it's an invitation to a croquet game. So she goes
Speaker 1: to the that the fish, goes to the Duchess's door
Speaker 1: and delivers it to a taxi dermied frog This, to
Speaker 1: me is the one scary moment in this movie when
Speaker 1: that door slams open and we get our first like
Speaker 1: jump scared, look at the Texas dermaed frog. I don't
Speaker 1: know what it is, but it's just shocking, and I
Speaker 1: think they intended it that way. Yeah, this is also
Speaker 1: this whole sequence also has a lot of um of
Speaker 1: baby crying in it, like that's the that's the soundscape
Speaker 1: that we have going on here, which of course fits
Speaker 1: the scene. It's not like it was just put in
Speaker 1: here to make us feel uneasy, but it did add
Speaker 1: to the uneasiness of the scene. I think, like, you
Speaker 1: can't have that much baby crying in your film and
Speaker 1: it not unnerved the viewer a bit. I mean, we're
Speaker 1: just hardwired to feel on edge when you're presented with that. Now,
Speaker 1: especially and I will say that this is a moment
Speaker 1: when the book deviates from from what has been adapted here.
Speaker 1: Uh in the book versions. I'm sure most of you know,
Speaker 1: the Duchess is inside and she's dealing to this small baby.
Speaker 1: But the baby is getting like pepper in its face
Speaker 1: from the cook making some soup in the background. So
Speaker 1: the baby is sneezing and crying and very upset. And
Speaker 1: then the cook just keeps throwing cutlery and plates and
Speaker 1: dishes and pots and pans at Alice, just to be like,
Speaker 1: get out of here, go away. So so we hear
Speaker 1: the din going on inside, all the shaking and plates
Speaker 1: and cutlery being thrown around. But when Alice opens the
Speaker 1: door to go inside, it's just the white rabbit and
Speaker 1: a baby. So, at least for me, this is kind
Speaker 1: of shocking because it's like, no, no, no, this is
Speaker 1: not how this story goes. Oh, I need to be
Speaker 1: on my toes. This isn't really going to follow what
Speaker 1: I expect to happen. Uh. Now, so it's been the
Speaker 1: rabbit throwing the plates and cups and all those things, which, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's still scary. She runs away, she has
Speaker 1: the baby, and then the baby turns into a pig,
Speaker 1: just like from the book. Look that that the pig
Speaker 1: runs away. There we are, yeah, and thankfully the baby
Speaker 1: this the sound of a crying baby becomes predominantly the
Speaker 1: sound of a squealing pig, which is easier to take,
Speaker 1: yes and cuter, I would say, yeah. Then uh we
Speaker 1: move on to probably the most famous scene from the story.
Speaker 1: Of Alice in Wonderland. The Mad Hatter scene at the
Speaker 1: mad Tea party. Uh, here's how they adapted it. Basically,
Speaker 1: there's a very creepy wooden marionette of the Mad Hatter,
Speaker 1: which is one of the more human elements we've seen
Speaker 1: in this story so far. And the march Hare is
Speaker 1: a very filthy wind up stuffed toy of a rabbit.
Speaker 1: So no, no, no, no taxed on me for this
Speaker 1: rabbit it is. It is a stuffed toy and of
Speaker 1: course very dirty. Yeah. The scene is of course very mad,
Speaker 1: and all the things you'd expect happen in it. Um
Speaker 1: wow wow. So many times do they just kind of
Speaker 1: like go in this loop, starting with the march Hair
Speaker 1: putting butter in a watch and then he attaches the
Speaker 1: watch to the Mad Hatter. The Mad Hatter drinks tea.
Speaker 1: We see out the back that that that the t
Speaker 1: is just pouring down his empty hole and out the
Speaker 1: back of this of this marionette puppet, and then they
Speaker 1: need clean cups. They moved down, repeat, repeat, repeat, It
Speaker 1: just goes and goes. Yeah, this sequence goes on for
Speaker 1: a while. This was for the most part, even though
Speaker 1: this film has again kind of a subdued pacing to it.
Speaker 1: It's not going to have it's his you know, art
Speaker 1: film pacing as opposed to modern child cinema pacing. But
Speaker 1: but for the most part, I feel like there's not
Speaker 1: a dull moment in the whole piece. There's always something
Speaker 1: interesting to look at. This one this one scene maybe
Speaker 1: goes on a little too long for my taste. I
Speaker 1: could have maybe done with just like six pocket watches
Speaker 1: being buttered and not like eight pocket watches buttered. But
Speaker 1: it's still it's still excellent. I I don't I don't
Speaker 1: want to trash on it. Yeah, and I think it
Speaker 1: does a good job of kind of um, you know,
Speaker 1: in a very simple, subdued way, talking about you know
Speaker 1: how uh you know, the the repetition of actions and
Speaker 1: and and basically having this insanity be very practical and
Speaker 1: then this storytelling. But yeah, no it works. But you're right,
Speaker 1: it is definitely repetitive on purpose. And we see a
Speaker 1: quick shot of the dormouse, but in this he is
Speaker 1: not a dormouse. He is a fox stole, or at
Speaker 1: least what I presume as a fox, some sort of
Speaker 1: like you know, the kind of wrap that a fancy
Speaker 1: person would wear made of fur. Um, it's not a
Speaker 1: drunk little sleepy mouse that's cute like like we see
Speaker 1: in the Disney animated version. It is a pealth of
Speaker 1: some kind that crawls around on the table and licks
Speaker 1: out the teacups. Yeah. Um, moving on. Next, of course,
Speaker 1: Alice leaves this party. It's it's too mad for her.
Speaker 1: She is, she's not a fan of this. Uh. The
Speaker 1: white rabbit passes by and she chases after it, and
Speaker 1: this brings us to the croquet scene, another very famous scene.
Speaker 1: Now I love this because it's the most practical adaptation visually.
Speaker 1: All of the cards from this scene are cards. They
Speaker 1: are cut out, they are they are puppeted with like
Speaker 1: a little just like you know, little brads. They're all
Speaker 1: two dimensional, very flat. It's it's it's it's a great
Speaker 1: adaptation with this. And of course, since um the Queen
Speaker 1: of hearts big order that she says when she's upset,
Speaker 1: off with their heads, they can actually come off because
Speaker 1: these are paper cards and Um, in the book, we
Speaker 1: never actually see anyone beheaded. It's like it's like understood
Speaker 1: that she always says, go behead these people, but they
Speaker 1: never actually kill anyone. She just forgets about it and
Speaker 1: moves on with her life. We see the executioner, which
Speaker 1: is the White Rabbit, pull out these giant scissors that
Speaker 1: he's been hauling around this whole movie. That's that's his
Speaker 1: execution device. He cuts off the heads of these cards
Speaker 1: and they they are they are lifeless after the heads
Speaker 1: are gone. Yeah. Yeah, he snips a number of paper
Speaker 1: heads off and sometimes not paper heads, but he jumps
Speaker 1: in there and execute um. So we move on to,
Speaker 1: of course, the famous actual croquet game. Uh the the
Speaker 1: the flamingos are start off as cards, of course, and
Speaker 1: the hedgehogs that are being hit around his balls are
Speaker 1: these little pin cushions, Like, oh, great, great choice. But
Speaker 1: then things are things are starting to turn wild. Things
Speaker 1: are starting to get a little weird as they do
Speaker 1: towards the end of a story. The flamingos have suddenly
Speaker 1: turned into real live chickens jumping around and are causing
Speaker 1: mayhem in what has been a a very no no,
Speaker 1: only Alice is alive here reality. Suddenly we have live chickens,
Speaker 1: and then the pin cushions turned into real hedgehogs. Now
Speaker 1: they're crawling around and it's it's it's it's a little
Speaker 1: um surprising, a little baffling, but but but you go
Speaker 1: along with it. And then I love this part because
Speaker 1: it's just some very subtle commentary but very good. Uh.
Speaker 1: The White Rabbit then walks up to Alice and gives
Speaker 1: her a script, and it's like quick, now it's time
Speaker 1: for the try. All let's go, and so Alice is
Speaker 1: supposed to learn her parts, uh for her participation in
Speaker 1: this trial. Now there's a seat maybe skipping head. But
Speaker 1: there's also a scene here where we see the mad
Speaker 1: Hatter in the march Hare again playing cards, right, and
Speaker 1: their their execution is ordered. White Rabbit jumps in cuts
Speaker 1: their heads off, but then their bodies are still alive,
Speaker 1: and they reach around and they find, of course the
Speaker 1: wrong head, and they put the wrong heat on top
Speaker 1: of their body. So now we have the the march
Speaker 1: Hare's body with the mad Hatter's head and vice versa.
Speaker 1: And then they just continue playing cards, much like the
Speaker 1: logic of Bill being sewn up while blinking. It's it's
Speaker 1: like none, everybody's fine, you know. Uh. So the the
Speaker 1: trial happens, who stole the Queen's tarts? Alice is stubborn
Speaker 1: and doesn't want to go along with the script. She's
Speaker 1: trying to use logic on them and spell out nobody
Speaker 1: is guilty. That the charts are right there, and of
Speaker 1: course these are the very ugly uh seed tooth brown
Speaker 1: gunky tarts that we've seen throughout this story. And uh,
Speaker 1: she wakes up just just like it goes. Alice wakes up,
Speaker 1: but she's still in her dingy, dirty old house. That
Speaker 1: part wasn't a dream, and um, some of the artifacts
Speaker 1: from her dream still remain here in this what we
Speaker 1: presume is a real real life for her. Um, the
Speaker 1: rabbit terrarium where the taxidermy white rabbit was is still broken,
Speaker 1: and the white rabbit is still gone. The nails that
Speaker 1: he bit off with his rabbit teeth are still sitting there. Uh,
Speaker 1: the drawer still exists, and there's a pair of scissors
Speaker 1: in this drawer inside this terrarium, the rabbit scissors. So
Speaker 1: Alice picks up the scissors, and as a as a
Speaker 1: final line, we have Alice saying he's late as usual.
Speaker 1: I think I'll cut his head off, thought Alice to herself,
Speaker 1: And that's pretty much. Yeah, that's like credits. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it really does set up that no, this is just
Speaker 1: all in her mind. She is, she is every one
Speaker 1: of these creatures. And in fact, there's a visual moment
Speaker 1: to that, kind of a company's that that's very beautiful.
Speaker 1: When she's waking up from her dream, there's this moment
Speaker 1: where she's kind of thrashing her head back and forth,
Speaker 1: and her head transforms into each of the creatures briefly,
Speaker 1: you know, Queen of Hearts for a moment, Matt Hatter
Speaker 1: for a moment, White Rabbit for a moment right before
Speaker 1: she wakes up, Just just quick visual cue. And then
Speaker 1: coupled with this line of I think I'll cut his
Speaker 1: head off something, the you know, the Queen of Hearts
Speaker 1: would say, we go, okay, this is just a very imaginative,
Speaker 1: imaginative girl, that this is the world she's creating. Are
Speaker 1: we still in that world? Because look, here's still a
Speaker 1: drawer inside a you know, a terrarium where a drawer
Speaker 1: would not fit. And again, this is not as dark
Speaker 1: as a nice it's really it's it's not played for darkness.
Speaker 1: The music that plays at the very end is is
Speaker 1: actually more light and wins the cole really one of
Speaker 1: the few against a few touches of emotional manipulation by
Speaker 1: the music. But but even then, it doesn't feel like
Speaker 1: it's really augmenting the existing trajectory of the scene. It's
Speaker 1: it's there's nothing creepy about Alice saying, well, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go cut that rabbit's head off now or what or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a it's presented with this kind of
Speaker 1: you know, childlike imaginative wonder. I think now that we
Speaker 1: have wrapped up this story a really good elevator pitch
Speaker 1: since we've said it so many times, it's not as
Speaker 1: creepy as it seems. Yeah, but not uncreepy. Like if
Speaker 1: you like, if the idea of creepy stop motion animation
Speaker 1: appeals to you, you will love this film. There's a
Speaker 1: lot to love in it. But if if you're afraid
Speaker 1: of of creepy stop motion animation going too far, well
Speaker 1: this film will probably not be going too far for
Speaker 1: you unless you have a very low threshold. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: fully agree. It's uh and I I just find it wonderful.
Speaker 1: I I think it's very original, very easy to watch too,
Speaker 1: like like like it goes down easy for something that
Speaker 1: can be really ob to, something with no dialogue deliberate pacing,
Speaker 1: caustic sound design, and um, you know, all all the choices. Honestly,
Speaker 1: it's actually very watchable, very simple. It's it's still just
Speaker 1: a great film. And I think you're right when you
Speaker 1: said perhaps because it has the blueprint of the original
Speaker 1: book to work from, we can kind of just like
Speaker 1: follow along much easier, you know. It's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: an easy narrative to follow. Yeah, it's. I think it's
Speaker 1: more watchable than than some sort of creepy stop motion
Speaker 1: works that I've seen, Like I think particularly there's some works,
Speaker 1: some work by Jerry Barta that I also quite like.
Speaker 1: And it but and it's also sort of in the
Speaker 1: realm of like strange decrepit garbage comes around, it comes
Speaker 1: alive and starts crawling around all over the place, but
Speaker 1: is maybe a little less accessible. And you've got to
Speaker 1: definitely be on board for that sort of thing where
Speaker 1: this film is kind of meeting you halfway. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I give this two thumbs up. All right. Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, uh, look, I guess we're gonna go
Speaker 1: and close this episode out, but we'd love to hear
Speaker 1: from everyone out there if you have thoughts on Alice,
Speaker 1: if you have thoughts on other films of full length
Speaker 1: and short by John's Funkmeyer or any of the other
Speaker 1: stop motion artists that we mentioned in this episode right in,
Speaker 1: we would love to hear from you. Reminder that we're
Speaker 1: primarily a science podcast. Here's stuff to blow your mind,
Speaker 1: but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns and
Speaker 1: just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 1: I blog about the movies that we cover here on
Speaker 1: some new to music dot com and if you use
Speaker 1: letterbox that's l E T T E R B o
Speaker 1: x D dot com. We have a profile there it's
Speaker 1: weird House. We have all the movies we've covered listed
Speaker 1: there as well as sometimes there's a peak at what
Speaker 1: movies are to come in case you want to watch ahead.
Speaker 1: And if anyone out there is missing Joe while he's
Speaker 1: on his paternity leave, I have a little treat for you.
Speaker 1: An episode that he and I recorded back before he
Speaker 1: went on his leave airs today literally today, the same
Speaker 1: the same day, this airs of my podcast Rusty Needles
Speaker 1: Record Club find out wherever you find podcasts and um
Speaker 1: if people have never heard my show before. Basically, it's
Speaker 1: a book club, but for music. Each episode is a
Speaker 1: different album. Me and my guest discussed that album. Uh,
Speaker 1: Joe has been on a couple of times. We're hoping
Speaker 1: to get rob on soon in the future, and this
Speaker 1: one was Joe's pick, and he picked the self titled
Speaker 1: Black Sabbath album, their debut. So if you'd like to
Speaker 1: hear me and Joe discuss Black Sabbath's debut album, yeah,
Speaker 1: just go to wherever you get your podcasts, type in
Speaker 1: Rusty Needles Record Club. You'll see a cartoon dog as
Speaker 1: the logo. You'll know that's me and Yeah, listen to
Speaker 1: me and Joe talk some Black Sabbath. Alright, that that
Speaker 1: is seasonally appropriate. Yes, So thanks for hosting, Seth, but
Speaker 1: also of course thanks Seth Nicholas Johnson for producing the show.
Speaker 1: And if anyone out there wants to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us, well just email us at contact at stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: for My Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app,
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