Little Otik
Little Otik Image
Metascore
74 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 13 Critics What's this?

User Score
7.9 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 7 Ratings

Your Score
0 out of 10
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  • Starring: Jan Hartl, Veronika Zilková
  • Summary: This film is based upon a classic fairy tale of an infertile couple who adopt a tree stump as their baby.

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10 out of 13
  2. Mixed: 3 out of 13
  3. Negative: 0 out of 13
  1. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    90
    Magnificently twisted black comedy.
    All this critic's reviews
  2. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kevin Thomas
    80
    Little Otik is too outre not to turn off some, but for those who can go the increasingly macabre distance, its sheer power to confound can be enthralling.
  3. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    80
    Wickedly funny, deeply disturbing, live-action retelling of an old Czech folktale.
  4. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Michael Dequina
    60
    The film does drag, particularly toward the end as the conclusion becomes increasingly obvious and too slow to arrive. For the most part, though, getting there is a wild and fascinating ride.

See all 13 Critic Reviews

User Reviews

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Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 6 out of 6
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 6
  3. Negative: 0 out of 6
  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… Expand
  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

See all 6 User Reviews

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