Little Otik (2001)

Jan Svankmajer is certainly one of the strangest filmmakers in history....and I am not talking about strange but mega-strange...and often very creepy. This Czech filmmaker has been working on mostly stop-motion films for decades and the movies are almost impossible to describe....you just have to see them to believe the weirdness of Svankmajer's imagination! His version of "Alice in Wonderland" ("Alice", 1988) is about his most bizarre films. But tonight I finally got to see his "Greedy Guts" (also called "Little Otik") and certainly didn't disappoint when it comes to weirdness!"Greedy Guts" is unusual for Svankmajer in that it's mostly a live action film...with some stop-motion here and there. In this bizarre fairy tale- like story, a young couple want to have children but cannot. One day, the husband pulls up a tree stump and fashions it into a crude version of a child. While it obviously looks almost nothing like a child and he apparently intended it as a joke, his deranged wife believes it's her new baby and goes to amazing lengths to convince her neighbors she's pregnant. Ultimately, she pretends to go into labor and soon comes home from the hospital with this tree stump baby! But the couple hide the fact that it's a stump and pretend as if the child is real...and the neighbors are fooled.Now I know this sounds strange....but soon the film will go off the deep end in strangeness! Soon the woman begins to feed this 'baby' cabbage soup. However, the baby soon magically becomes a living creature...and it doesn't want soup...it wants meat! First, it eats a few pets...which is annoying enough. But then it eats a neighbor...and then another neighbor...and then another! But the foster parents of this abomination cannot bring themselves to kill the monster and so they keep it hidden in the basement. During this time, the little girl you've seen throughout the film finds Little Otik and befriends it...and begins bringing it food as well! What's next in this super-bizarro but well made film? Well, get the DVD from Netflix and find out for yourself. And, if you think of it, try "Alice" as well. I would like to say you won't be sorry...but you might! The films are not for normal folks but offer a twisted version of stop-motion that is hard to fathom until you see it for yourself!

There are many forms of horror, and most of them are international. However, there is the special Horror of Czech children stories, and it is truly unique. Without doubt, Jan Svankmajer is its leading representative in film. Husserl wrote that for the constitution of consciousness with its transcendental creations, reality in the sense of real world is not necessary. Thus, the productions of a transcendental Ego are self-consistent, although they may be senseless. Analyse Otesanek under this perspective. Remember that Kafka wrote about Odradek: "The whole appears senseless, but it is in his genre complete". The problems for the family do not start because the husband finds a piece of wood that has remote similarity to a baby. The problem arises when his wife decides that this object is subject and because her will changes reality. Otesanek penetrates from his own ontological space into the ontological space of the family and their environment. Like Kafka's "Odradek", Otesanek has a name, a certain shape, a distinct behavior and lives in a certain place, but all that is by far insufficient to disclose the mysterious hybrid between object and subject that Otesanek is. When you watch the movie, notice that you never see a picture of Otesanek. You only see the images in the book of the little girl - but also be aware that, "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image"!

Many filmgoers learned their fairy tales from the works of Walt Disney--sanitized, family-friendly versions of stories which were, in their original incarnations, often violent, grisly,and grotesque. This film definitely isn't Disney! "Little Otik" is a modern take on an old Czech fairy tale, and it is every bit as gruesome as the original Grimms' fairy tales and other folktales were fashioned to be, before they were diluted into innocent kiddie stories full of big-eyed princesses and cute, wisecracking animals. The story concerns an infertile couple who discover a tree stump with a vaguely human form and, in their desperation for a child, begin to dress it up and treat it as a baby. Like Pinocchio, the stump comes to life; unlike Pinocchio, it has no interest in singing and dancing. Instead, it likes to devour anything and anyone who comes near it. Oh, and Otik is also not the type of character whose image is likely to be licensed for toys, storybooks, children's bedsheets and the like--in fact it's one of the most hideous creatures in the history of film.Like many a fairy tale, it's up to one little girl who uses her wits to try to save the day--or at least the remainder of the cast from being eaten. It's an ugly job, though. And there's not much chance of a happy ending.For devotees of mythology and folktales, this is a great example of what those stories were REALLY like. Yikes!

Anti-spoiler warning: Do _not_ see the film's trailer, it spoils the film dreadfully. And this is one film which you don't want spoilt.This is a long film, in places utterly absorbing, in others quite shocking, in many places extremely funny, but alas rather predictable and a little repetitive too. On the whole quite a work of art. And oh so Czech too, which is nothing but a complement, in particular for the brilliantly executed and highly amusing animation of Otesánek.There are almost no weak roles, or weakly acted roles, and no matter how crazy people's actions or decisions might be, they all seem to be quite in character. In particular look for excellent performances from Veronika Zilková as the "mother" Bozena, struck with a terminal case of wannabe-breeder rabies. The change in the interplay between the young girl Alzbetka and the very old Mr. Zlabek is superbly done - both having their time as the creepy one, and both as the innocent one.This was going to get an extremely high score (and I tend to vote low on the whole), until the ending appeared, and went. I thought it cheapened the film slightly, but I still gave it a pretty good score nonetheless.