the taxidermic rabbit is still broken and empty. Opening the hidden drawer in the case, she finds the White Rabbit's scissors. Examining the scissors, Alice says to herself, "He's late, as usual. I think I'll cut his head off." Cast Kristýna Kohoutová as Alice In Alice's English version: Camilla Power as Alice's voice Production Jan Švankmajer, who had been making short films since the mid-1960s, says he got the confidence to make a feature-length film after finishing the shorts Jabberwocky and Down to the Cellar. He 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 civilisation." 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 realisation of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure. My Alice is a realised dream." Despite the film's heavy usage of stop motion, and unlike most other traditional stop motion films, the film does not utilize any miniature sets to portray its special effects. Release The film premiered in the United States, where it was released on 3 August 1988. It played at the 1989 Annecy International Animated Film Festival where it received the prize for best feature film. In Czechoslovakia it premiered on 1 November 1990. The English dubbed version features the voice of Camilla Power. Critical response In The New York Times, Caryn James wrote that although Švankmajer "strips away all sweetness and light, he does not violate Lewis Carroll's story", and called Alice an "extraordinary film [which] explores the story's dark undercurrents". James described the animation as "remarkably fluid" and held forward the dynamics of the film, which contrasts visually captivating elements with superficiality: "Mr. Švankmajer never lets us forget we are watching a film in which an actress plays Alice telling a story", although, "with its extreme close-ups, its constant motion and its smooth animation, the film is so visually active that it distracts us from a heavy-handed fact - this is