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Little Otik | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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arel (Hartl) and his wife, Bozena (Zilková), would do just about anything for a baby. But nature has been cruel to Mr. and Mrs. Horak, rendering them both as barren as can be. So one day, while at their country house, Karel figures he'll lighten his wife's mood by giving her a tree stump he finds in their garden that he's fashioned to look a bit like a child. Bozena takes this as no joke, however, treating this bit of wood as if it were a real baby—bathing, dressing and singing to their new "child" with the utmost joy.
Eventually, Karel somewhat accepts the fact that his wife is not going to give up her continuing delusion, and he most reluctantly agrees to go along with her plot of a fake pregnancy, so that they can have little "Otik" become a proper part of their lives, no questions asked (by their several, pleasantly nosy neighbors). But Karel's due for one more surprise—coming home from work one evening to find little Otik actually breastfeeding from his beaming wife!
As all children do, the Horaks' baby presents his parents with a number of new and unique challenges. For one, while Otik's very much alive, he's still very much not human, which is becoming an increasingly difficult thing to hide, especially from the strangely precocious little girl next door, Alzbetka (Adamcová), who's almost as obsessed with the ins and outs of babies (and how they're made) as the Horaks once were.
Their other, even bigger problem: "little" Otik is growing at an alarming rate, and his appetite's becoming harder and harder to appease. The cat's the first to go—as it sometimes is when a baby comes into a household, though not usually as a meal. But it's after the postman becomes a casualty of the Horak's love for their child that the couple has to do some hard thinking about the fate of their offspring. Things would be so much simpler if they could just stop the relentless curiosity of Alzbetka, and if they could stop people from coming by to visit.
A fairy tale that's far from short and sweet
Based on an old folktale, Little Otik brings to the screen a great deal of the fantastic viscerality and narrativized morality that such ancient stories have been presenting audiences with for generations. Surrealist Czech director Jan Svankmajer does a deft job of realizing themes like the grotesqueness of consumption (with a plethora of shots of people eating food, often linked with images of pink-skinned babies or with some horrific "meal" Otik's just consumed), or the dangers of both desire and nature, and he's done so with no small amount of wonderfully dark humor. But, as the tale of Little Otik moralizes, sometimes there can be too much of a good thing.
At 127 minutes, Little Otik could've used some serious trimming. Its plot eventually gets tangled up and mired down in its seemingly endless series of Otik-related snafus, its visual gags become overused and tired, and many viewers will likely be able to stand only so many close-up shots of people's mouths eating or talking.
Hartl's Karel is a marvelously frazzled, well-meaning husband to Zilková's Bozena, a woman driven to mania by her obsessive love for the child she's wanted so desperately. And while the character of Alzbetka is a fascinating and funny piece of work, it appears there's only so much talent in the pool of nine-year-old actresses working in the Czech Republic. Alzbetka's parents, played by Kretschmerova and Novy, do have some great interactions, however.
The two different kinds of animation in the film—stop-motion for certain Otik actions (puppetry for others) and cell/cutout animation for the Otesánek tale sequences (Alzbetka eventually works out the parallels of this folktale and the things going on in her apartment building)—are certainly up to the standard now expected from Svankmajer, who started his career in the '60s as an animator. All in all, the creature that is Otik is an impressive creation. But, like both the child and the parent, Svankmajer seems to have been both a bit too indulged and a bit too indulgent in his modern-day folktale.
Intermittently throughout the film, as Alzbetka's father is watching television, various commercials come on selling products that—cheerily, hilariously—make claims like, "All other brands are not even fit for worms!" Now that's some funny and pithy satire. — Matt
Also in this issue: The Mothman Prophecies and Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda: "Ouroboros"
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