Jan Svankmajer is a self labeled surrealist, great film-maker and animator. He was born in Prague on the 4th September 1934. He studied puppetry for many years, influenced by the present of a puppet one Christmas when he was young.
Has he grew up, he experimented with different kinds of theater including surrealist, which was introduced to him by Vratislav Effenberger and manifested itself in his first surrealist film 'The Garden'.
After a few years in 1964 , Svankmajer began to create just shorts, such as 'Down to the cellar' and 'Dimensions of dialouge' but then after twenty years of working in the same area of film, Svankmajer, in 1988, finally got a chance for his long held dream, to make a feature film based on Alice in Wonderland - by Lewis Carroll.
"Alice" as it was so aptly named, was about a young live girl mixing with stop motion animation characters, as the pull her further and further into wonderland. Svankmajer "followed the film reasonably close" - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095715/plotsummary but was genius in the way that he made slabs of meat into characters and an old sock move like a caterpillar by just adding glass beads for eyes.
I think that "Alice" defines all the work that Jan Svankmajer has put in over the years, it conveys a true child's story, but he makes it strange, funny, and terrifying at the same time.
We took inspiration from Svankmajer to create our own Alice, using his ideas on creating characters out of nothing, taking the ideas of a un-wonderland, and so on.
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