Alice is a 1988 surrealistdark fantasy film written and directed by Jan Švankmajer. Its original Czech title is Něco z Alenky, which means “Something from Alice”. It is a loose adaptation of Lewis Carroll‘s first Alice book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), about a girl who chases a white rabbit into a bizarre fantasy land. Alice is played by Kristýna Kohoutová. The film combines live-action with stop-motion animation, and is distinguished by its dark production design.
For Švankmajer, a prolific director of short films for more than two decades, Alice became his first venture into feature-length filmmaking. The director had been disappointed by other adaptations of Carroll’s book, which interpret it as a fairy tale. His aim was instead to make the story play out like an amoral 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. (wiki)
The film’s soundtrack includes music by João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Vinicius de Moraes and Paulo Moura, with some of the musicians also appearing in the voice cast as themselves testifying about Tenório’s importance and influence as part of Goldblum’s investigation. (wiki)
Probably this is one of the most expected pieces of SF this year. And it delivers and is excellent on several accounts, contrasting with most of what gets labeled as SF nowadays. There is no lack of visually stunning cinematic works that seem to lack something – be it plotwise, involvement, or character development or are bound to repeat some form of techno-orientalist cliche with super-advanced yet missing Asians.
Is there any type of exoplanetary SF possible today when most of the future visions are somehow retro vintage SF golden age or very derivative? This was contradicted at the end of 2023 by Joseph Bennett and Charles Huettner with a new independent, daring SF “eco-gothic” SF series production for the Max video-on-demand subscription channel that emanated out of the Californian animation industry. Scavengers Reign has somehow demonstrated that not everything is being consumed by the Disney Studios monster. Although I doubt there’s life after you fall into the D sarlacc’s capacious stomach.
Scavenger Reign stands closer to the European animation school and in particular the French comics and animation. It oozes Métal Hurlant and René Laloux with the geometric forests, panoramic vistas and its changeling alien ecosystems. But there is certainly also an anime/manga aspect – or the traces of the best of anime and manga. There is a touch of weird naturalism, of eerie transformations, and of horrific metamorphosis, particularly if one thinks in terms of the Katsuhiro Otomo’s masterpiece Akira from 1982 which was stunning for its realism and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga (not anime!) by Hayao Miyazaki. Biological genomes get hijacked, and the extended virome that permeates alien planets trafficks information across the species barrier. Everything is inter-species, everything sporulates, and telekinetic parasitism abounds (something close to the rove beetle eating baby ants while the ants think it is one of them – thx Ben Woodard for reminding me of this crazy true fable), but also the dance of co-evolution.
It is also the first US SF product (with help from South Korean animators – Studio JDD) – and it is no accident that it is an animation piece that finally does justice to some authors that have never been adapted for the screen such as the exoplanetary works of Joan Lyn Slonczewski (The Children Star) or only partially so – Jeff VanderMeer (particularly Borne and The Strange Bird two of my favorite pieces of new weird & postapocalyptic post- biopunk SF).
Otherness participates here at every level – from hallucinations of even the most common kind, say your lover’s voice and image that is being somehow puppeteered by something really different (do not think Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris), a plethora of really alien creatures using human carriers via their feelings and thoughts, but these thoughts and feelings somehow animating the alien critters as well in return. To affect means to be also affected (thinking here of Deleuze, but also Whithead’s Critique of Pure Affect). Also, we should not expect alien sentience to conform to our technological imaginary – it can be really very much a creature of strange and lowly appetites, irrespective of its extra sensorial powers. So you could really imagine the corporate alien slugs from Charles Stross’s Accelerando leaving sticky marks on Scavengers Reign’s world.
It is also one animation that takes into account our new scientific knowledge about species being as complex communities, interplays, or choreographies of genes or societies of genes of entirely different species. This knowledge constantly reshaped our understanding of what an individual being is or offers us continuous glimpses into how tight-knit such relationships are or how human agency or artificial agency dissolves or is being constantly rerouted within these webs of agency, non-agency, and misplaced intentionality. Parasitism is pervasive but it is also just one expression of the complexity and mutualism of such an ecosystem – it’s fleas upon fleas all the way down and up. There’s also a bizarre in-betweenness, much on this planet actually thrives on cross-fertilization with non-alien, human intruders and their creations (robots). There is a great scene where Azi and Levi (a human and robot partnership that survived the crash of the Demeter 277 cargo ship) who was cultivating and gardening new earthly gardens – Azi the robot is itself a walking garden. Inside its machinery there is some kind of new hybrid semiconductor with slime molds as a partner (it seems to me), maybe something close to unconventional computing is aiming at since some time.
Marvel’s Hit-Monkey, or simply Hit-Monkey, is an American adult animated streaming television series created by Will Speck and Josh Gordon for the streaming service Hulu, based on the Marvel Comics character of the same name. The series is produced by Marvel Television, with Gordon and Speck serving as showrunners.
The series stars Ally Maki, Olivia Munn, Nobi Nakanishi, Fred Tatasciore, George Takei, and Jason Sudeikis. Hit-Monkey was announced and ordered at Hulu in February 2019, as part of a group of series based on Marvel characters that were intended to lead to a crossover special titled The Offenders, with it being produced by Marvel Television. Oversight of the series was moved to Marvel Studios in December 2019 when Marvel Television was folded into that company. in May 2022, Variety reported Hit-Monkey was not expected to be renewed. (wiki)
The Bob’s Burgers Movie is a 2022 American animated musical comedy film based on the animated television series Bob’s Burgers. It is directed by the series creator Loren Bouchard and series director Bernard Derriman (in their feature directorial debuts). (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 