1. Joshc

   10

   For Tolkien, fairy tales were not concerned with possibility so much as desirability: "If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded. . . . " In that sense, Jan Svankmajer's Little Otik is an even more authentic fairy story, dealing as it does with the yearning for what is impossible and a rebellion against the real. In his fourth feature, Svankmajer has transposed a grotesque Czech folktale about a childless couple who raise a tree stump as their baby to contemporary Prague. Filled with strollers, the city is likewise an incubator for fantasy. The storklike, uptight Karel (Jan Hartl) discovers babies inside melons and sees infants in the marketplace, fished from tanks, weighed, and wrapped in newspapers to go. To tease his pining wife, Bozena (Veronika Zilková), Karel uproots a tree stump and presents it to her. Bozena is totally accepting—outfitting the stump with baby clothes, tenderly bathing and beatifically nursing it until her little Otik comes to life. We're all monsters—although there hasn't been much since the flayed, mewling creature in David Lynch's Eraserhead to equal this gnarly on-screen offspring. Svankmajer's baby, however, is not so frail. A product of herky-jerky single-frame animation, the stump is outfitted with a real tongue. The voracious embodiment of infantile orality, Otik recalls the horror of mindless creation—he's a sprig of the rampant jungle growth that so horrified the narrator of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Bozena wheels her swaddled baby through the neighborhood until the creature sprouts teeth and develops an appetite for meat; thereafter, Otik has to be kept home and fed with bags of groceries. A social worker arrives in search of the baby she hears is locked in the apartment. "Don't worry, I won't eat him," she assures Bozena. Ha. A curious neighbor girl consults her fairy-tale book and figures out what's going on. (Svankmajer presents this version of the Otik story as a series of animated cut-outs.) The child wants a baby of her own and, unfazed by the bloody mess Otik leaves behind, takes it upon herself to feed the carnivorous tree. "Are you going to eat like that with dirty roots?" she scolds him. Otik aside, Svankmajer's movie contains relatively little animation. It is, however, filled with outrageous textural sight gags, particularly the persistent match-cuts from babies to food. The mode is alchemical and the emotions are beneath primitive—the subject, as the Czech surrealist has remarked, is the "materialization of desire." At 127 minutes, Little Otik may be overlong, but the excessive length contributes to its realness—its uncanny ambition to bring objects to life.… Expand

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2. ChadS.

   7

   "Little Otik" loses steam when the little girl becomes the animated tree's caretaker. Not only does the film drag, it's also hard to buy a small child not being intimidated by an abomination against nature. Yes, it's a black comedy, but there has to be some rules. Also, we can already recognize that "Little Otik" is a fairy tale, so watching the girl read the story from an anthology in which her real world is imitating, perhaps, flaws this otherwise beguilling film with a little too much self-awareness.… Expand

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