LITTLE OTIK

2000

JAN SVANKMAJER

Little Otik starts off promisingly, with Svankmajer's trademark crisp blend of inventive surreality and hyperreal attentiveness to the palpable thingness of things. The first 45 minutes or so, in which we see a distraught young wife who has suffered repeated setbacks in her efforts to have a child end up mothering a baby-shaped tree stump instead, are the real deal--genuine Svank-funk. But when Svankmajer shifts the focus from the increasingly monstrous Otik and his "parents" to the efforts of a nine-year-old neighbor to solve the mystery of the weird baby, the film drags terribly. As always, Svankmajer combines live action with stop-motion photography and animation to create fascinating visuals--but the animated sequences, which dramatize the "Otesanek" fairy tale upon which the story is based, keep popping up long after they've worn out of their welcome.

On the plus side, Otik the living log is a hell of a thing, and Pavel Novy, who was hilarious in Svankmajer's amazing Conspirators of Pleasure, is good as ever as the grumpy father of our doughy Czech nymphet protagonist. But where Conspirators wove together its disparate strands into a resonant, unforgettable whole, Svankmajer's effort to produce a more accessible genre film ends up making 90 minutes feel like 3 hours.