Alice

The same year Who Framed Roger Rabbit blended hand-drawn cartoons and noir with big studio firepower, Jan Švankmajer dragged Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland through the looking glass and into a world of splintered dolls and taxidermy nightmares. Mixing live action and disturbing, tactile stop-motion animation, the great Czech surrealist’s debut feature transforms Alice’s descent into a waking dream of Victorian clutter. Decayed objects gnaw, toys bleed sawdust, and the White Rabbit—stitched-up and glassy-eyed—wields a pair of scissors like a surgical instrument. Less an adaptation than a dissonant echo of Carrollian logic, Alice is a marvel of handmade horror that channels the darker currents of adolescent imagination and, not unlike Us, treats the inner life of a child not as an innocent refuge but as haunted terrain. One of cinema’s strangest portals into the unconscious, and a rare moment to see it projected from an imported 35mm print.