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Narrated by Alice's disembodied lips, Lewis Carroll's prose is edged out like droplets and offers a pulsing rhythm to Jan Svankmajer's stop animation masterpiece ALICE (1988). The attention to detail in both the animation and composition of shots, which favors extreme close-ups, and an almost fetishistic obsession with the cracks and textures of inanimate objects, creates an atmosphere of the impossible.

[No Alice in Wonderland adaptation is stranger than "Alice" (1988),made by the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer... "Alice" is tactile in every way. Rather than music, Mr. Svankmajer employs exaggerated sound effects. The narrative, furnished by an unidentified child in British-accented English with a gravity matching that of young Ms. Kohoutova, enables Alice to speak for the creatures she encounters and further suggest that the Wonderland experience is her invention.

Here, as always, Svankmajer's methods are hugely enjoyable in their perversity... A wonderland, indeed, imbued with a grotesque, cruel, and menacing dream-logic at once distinctively Svankmajer's and true to the spirit of Carroll.

Švankmajer imbues his ever-changing Alice and Wonderland's objects, refashioned from those found in her bedroom, with the full weight of the surreal. The once ordinary and often old or discarded objects become unfamiliar and menacing in Alice's dreamscape; she acts out against the newly animate things and they also come after her... Švankmajer's ALICE is a work of art that reconstructs an extraordinary world out of all the rubble from his past.

Jan Švankmajer’s Alice gets it right by not filling in all the blanks. It doesn’t dazzle or patronise the audience by creating a complete functioning fantasy world as in the Disney films, it makes the children active participants in the play. It’s a celebration of what the imagination can do with limited technological means and seems to encourage children to explore their own imaginations.

Švankmajer’s Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) is only seven – and while this is not multiplex fare (far from it), its radical, beguiling unexpectedness and dazzling imaginative verve as an unslavish adaptation was able to enthral the intelligent 12-year-old beside me... It’s an astonishing film, a rather Lynchian (though never quite so dread-filled) journey into a dream-world.

Alice is an 86-minute film, a 125,000-frame puzzle, and a meticulously constructed infantile dream.

While purists may object to this Freudian gloss on Lewis Carroll, Svankmajer’s “Alice” is obviously the work of an artist of talent and vision that no student of surreal or fantastic cinema should miss.

If he has a deficiency, it's in his sense of narrative. For all its poetic power, "Alice" doesn't reveal Svankmajer to be a very natural storyteller, and occasionally we get bogged down in the enactment of his secret ceremonies. Not lost, but adrift. Still, Svankmajer's sinister visual music has an irresistible potency and allure. Watching it, we feel the enthrallment of the irrational.