I recently re-watched one of my favorite films, Alice (Něco z Alenky, its original Czech title, translates to "Something from Alice"). You can watch the film here.
Alice, written and directed in 1988 by Jan Švankmajer is a dark and brilliant reimagined adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. I love the way this film combines live-action with stop-motion animation and the nightmarishly surreal way that the objects around Alice (dolls, toys, furniture, pots and pans, dishes, etc) come to life as if they are possessed, through the use of stop-motion photography.
There are no miniature sets used in the stop-motion aspect of this film — all of the special effects come from animating real objects with stop-motion. Alice is a remarkable piece of art, and it's my favorite adaptation of Alice in Wonderland by far. Every piece of imagery in this film is beautifully crafted and hugely inspiring to me.
From Wikipedia:
Jan Švankmajer "described Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a work which had followed him since he was a child, as "one of the most important and amazing books produced by this civilization." He argued that other film adaptations of the story had interpreted it as a fairy tale, but that Carroll had written it like a dream, and that was what he wanted to transmit: "While a fairy tale has got an educational aspect — it works with the moral of the lifted forefinger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realization of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realized dream."
