Little Otik (Otesanek, 2000)

Filed Under BBT, Soylent Screen, Jef Taylor

 

 
Movie Reviews with BBT Critic Jef Taylor

 

A would-be mother, unable to conceive, is distraught.  Her husband is so heartbroken that he daydreams about fishmongers selling newborn babies by the pound on the street below the fertility clinic.  What he actually does to create his family is no less bizarre or improbable.  He chops a root out of the bare earth of his country cabin’s land, roughly hews it into a human form, a mandrake for his bride.  Her desperation and love animate this ugly tangle of plant material into a mewling baby.  That’s when the killing starts.

Director Jan Svankmajer has previously induced nightmares with his stop-motion adaptations of Alice in Wonderland (Neco z Alenky, 1988) and Faust (Lekce Faust, 1994).  Little Otik is only partly animated–that is, the golem-like monster baby made of tree root is a stop-motion puppet that interacts with live actors.  Child actor Kristina Adamcová is especially impressive, acting convincingly opposite a gnarled heap of bristling roots.  She comes to adopt the monstrous thing providing (as Seymour did, innocently at first, for Audrey 2) increasingly beastly meals for it’s insatiable hunger.

Despite the premise of a man-eating plant baby being tended to by a little girl, Little Otik is not a horror movie.  It’s a blackly comic fairy tale in a modern setting, and Svankmajer’s dreamlike images and odd pacing keep the viewer off balance, if not terrified.  There’s none of the shockingly brutal images found in the more recent "fairy tale for adults" Pan’s Labyrinth, for example.  In truth, the most nightmarish sights are the gory close-ups of Eastern European cuisine: gray soups, hideous oatmeal, and lingering scenes of a family sucking and mopping the yolks off of their sunny sides up.  It can’t possibly be accidental, and combined with the fact that humans are being devoured in the basement, this obsession with food and eating is something important to the filmmaker.

In the dvd extras (the worst kind: pages of text that you have to scroll through with your remote) we learn that cannibalism as a recurring theme in Svankmajer’s films is symbolic of human relationships.  To which I have to say: "Huh?"  Eating another being can be symbolic of taking in it’s power or its essence, or it can be an expression of one’s own power over that being.  How it stands in for human relationships is occult to me.  But there’s definitely something there, and watching this film gives one a curiosity for the director’s other works.  I only hope that his Alice and Faust don’t feature soup so prominently.

Jef Taylor is a film critic and a naturalist, who reminds you: animated root babies don’t eat people, ornamental cabbages do.

 

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Comments

One Response to “Little Otik (Otesanek, 2000)”

  1. Natalie L. Sin on November 6th, 2007 2:26 pm

    Oh…oh my. I must see this. No, I must OWN it.
    Luckily I have a gift card for just these kinds of emergencies!