Alice Darkly Twisted

Rating: 8/10 (22 June 2009)

Stop-motion animation is such a laborious task, particularly when presented in feature-length, that those few examples that are finally distributed are almost exclusively works of high quality both in form and content.
That's especially true for Henry Selick's meticulously crafted Gothic tales with their wicked sense of humour and their intuition for the magic of the bizarre. His latest work - a clever twist on "Alice in Wonderland" with subliminally menacing picture-perfect happiness replacing Carroll's liberating nonsense - succeeds in all the right departments, from the gorgeous vistas, the haunting score, the great character design and voice-work, the countless sight-gags, the well-paced narrative up to the balanced mixture of heart and brains.
The story is a tad too episodic and the showdown slightly disappoints, though. But it's a wonderful pic, anyway.
8 out of 10 button eyes