Keke Palmer is a talented actress who makes the most of her screen time. Unfortunately, the script is not up to par with Palmer’s dynamic and elegant performance. The character of Alice is severely underutilized. Half of the film’s runtime is devoted to life on the plantation, thus Alice’s escape and subsequent discovery that she is in the year 1973 never gets a moment to breathe. Despite Alice finding herself in a new century, the news never seems to shock Alice.

Jan Svankmajer’s Alice, the esteemed Czech animator’s feature-film debut from 1988, is far more than just a strange, wonderful, and surreal trip set within the charming ambience of an Eastern bloc TV fairytale. It is a strikingly original attempt to wound the skin of the story and to reveal its body by almost entirely stripping it of Carroll’s language and converting it into a an eerie and unsettling dreamscape.