Little Otik
dir. Svankmajer
Opens Fri May 31
Cinema 21
Babies are such gross little parasites, why anyone would want to have one is a mystery not even Stephen Hawking could decipher. Sure, you may think your biological clock is ticking and that perhaps having a child would add some meaning to your life or carry on the family name, but really all you are doing is adding another whining child to the world that will grow up to be another whining adult. Furthermore, perhaps you should see Little Otik, Jan Svankmajer’s cinematic reenactment of the fairy tale Otesanek, which shows what happens to naughty couples who want to spawn a dirty baby more than life itself. Though the over-two-hour Czech film will, at times, test the limits of your American attention span, Little Otik is a creepy, funny film that will delight the baby-haters and warn off the breeders for life. (Hopefully.)
With children and pregnant ladies all around, Karel and Bozenka Horak desperately want a baby of their own, but alas! They are both utterly barren. Their collective infertility drives them temporarily insane, which manifests itself when Mr. Horak digs a tree stump from the ground and carves it into the shape of a baby. They begin treating the tree as if it is a child, dressing it up in swaddling clothes, breast-feeding it, and pushing it around in a pram. They even manage to fool their neighbors into thinking the baby is real at least, until people in their apartment building start to disappear.
Directed by the man who created the incredibly animated Faust, Little Otik is shot amazingly–a very textured mix of surreal live action and inventive stop-motion animation/claymation. Because food plays a huge part in the story, Svankmajer focuses intensely on how it is filmed, practically turning it into characters. Porridges bubble up, eyeball-like; egg yolks are gelatinous and jiggly; and stews are practically evil. It makes the film funny, ominous, and larger-than-life–all essential fairy tale elements.
Quite possibly the best part of Little Otik is the disturbingly hilarious, pedophilic building caretaker, a likeable character that never would have flown in an American movie without being rewritten into a monsterous, dastardly antagonist. That is because Americans are too busy trying to procreate and make little American spawns, when really they should be honing their senses of humor. With luck, however, somebody will learn a thing or two from the awesome Little Otik.