Little Otik (2001)

I love this movie so much

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Jan Svankmajer is certainly one of the strangest filmmakers in history....and I am not talking about strange but mega-strange...and often very creepy. This Czech filmmaker has been working on mostly stop-motion films for decades and the movies are almost impossible to describe....you just have to see them to believe the weirdness of Svankmajer's imagination! His version of "Alice in Wonderland" ("Alice", 1988) is about his most bizarre films. But tonight I finally got to see his "Greedy Guts" (also called "Little Otik") and certainly didn't disappoint when it comes to weirdness!"Greedy Guts" is unusual for Svankmajer in that it's mostly a live action film...with some stop-motion here and there. In this bizarre fairy tale- like story, a young couple want to have children but cannot. One day, the husband pulls up a tree stump and fashions it into a crude version of a child. While it obviously looks almost nothing like a child and he apparently intended it as a joke, his deranged wife believes it's her new baby and goes to amazing lengths to convince her neighbors she's pregnant. Ultimately, she pretends to go into labor and soon comes home from the hospital with this tree stump baby! But the couple hide the fact that it's a stump and pretend as if the child is real...and the neighbors are fooled.Now I know this sounds strange....but soon the film will go off the deep end in strangeness! Soon the woman begins to feed this 'baby' cabbage soup. However, the baby soon magically becomes a living creature...and it doesn't want soup...it wants meat! First, it eats a few pets...which is annoying enough. But then it eats a neighbor...and then another neighbor...and then another! But the foster parents of this abomination cannot bring themselves to kill the monster and so they keep it hidden in the basement. During this time, the little girl you've seen throughout the film finds Little Otik and befriends it...and begins bringing it food as well! What's next in this super-bizarro but well made film? Well, get the DVD from Netflix and find out for yourself. And, if you think of it, try "Alice" as well. I would like to say you won't be sorry...but you might! The films are not for normal folks but offer a twisted version of stop-motion that is hard to fathom until you see it for yourself!

All in all, I'd say Otasanek / Little Otik / Greedy Guts was a pretty good film. Not Svankmajer's best by any means (that honor is reserved for his masterpiece, Alice / Neco z Alenky), but a good effort all the same. While some of the camera-work at times felt slightly awkward, the acting was overall pretty good. Keep in mind that it is a lower-budgeted foreign independent film, so it does not come anywhere near having a clean-cut and polished "Hollywood" feel to it (for me, that's a plus, however I realize many other people do not feel the same). When all is said and done, its a pretty good treatment to a Czech fairy tale, has several humorous scenes but there were a number of times when I just wasn't sure whether what I was seeing was intended to be funny or serious. Svankmajer's stylistic use of stop-motion animation is interesting to watch, and also at times disturbing. As mentioned by mostly every past reviewer, the story started to drag on after a while, reaching a whopping 126 minutes before finally giving over... Little Otik is not a film I'll ever find myself watching often, nor is it something I would recommend to a lot of people (as it is not exactly something most people would be able to get into), but I personally enjoyed it, I found myself laughing at the dry, absurdist humor of certain scenes and interactions, and I believe most fans of European avant-garde film are likely to also.

This is one fractured little fairytale! More Grimm Brothers than Disney, it is a truly twisted tale that is definitely not for the kiddies. It is a live action feature with stop motion animation sequences scattered throughout. The characters, although actual actors almost seemed animated themselves. The way it was filmed gave me the impression I was a witness to someone's actual dream (or nightmare). The choice of cast could not have been better. The performances are excellent and even the secondary players are perfect in their roles. The wife is absolutely mad and the husband knows this but cannot quite bring himself to deal with it. He spends much of the picture ranting and raving at the lunacy of it all. The wacky couple are nicely complimented by a parade of strange supporting characters. Among them, a little girl obsessed with sex and babies and a pedophile senior citizen. The characters imagine seeing some truly bizarre images. The first scene is our husband looking down on a fishmonger from a gynecologists office window. Instead of taking fish from the tank he is scooping up babies in his net and wrapping them up in newspaper. And of course there is little Otik. He's a freaking tree stump. An ugly, crying gnarly tree stump. At one point the mother scolds her husband for not varnishing her son enough. There is a body count, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to hardcore horror fans. This is for anyone who tastes run towards the strange and unusual. I did feel that the film runs a little long and I would have liked to have seen more of the stop motion animation. The film isn't going to be for everyone as it is definitely odd. It is delightfully demented and at times even disturbing but absolutely entertaining. It is a feast for the eyes and an assault on the senses. Highly Recommended!

The worldview that drives this movie is the notion that you cannot escape the stories of the past. Ruiz makes movies with this point, especially one I saw recently, "Geneologies." In this view, the teller doesn't capture a story, it is the other way around. There are only so many stories, and when one captures you, it will engulf you, only to be possibly bested by a stronger one.That's the story within this little movie, done well enough for TeeVee, I suppose. But it is also the story about why this and all Czech cinema is so defeatist. Yes, I know the Czech republic is a tiny nation, so we shouldn't expect much. But compared say, to New Zealand, the contrast in imagination is striking. Sure, they were bludgeoned by successively thuggish occupiers, but look at Polish cinema. Some are truly lyrical and life-altering things, no? What's happened with this movie: it has been captured by the larger Czech arc of defeat. That larger arc drives this and completely overtakes the best efforts of Svankmeir, who in a few earlier projects really seemed to have some promise as a visual artist if not a long form storyteller.The movie's story, since you likely won't see it, is of a couple who out of emotional need take a piece of yard waste as an infant, and he grows too big for his situation, eating everything he encounters. Meanwhile, a little girl in the same building follows that larger story by reading the "original" in a children's book. So she knows the score, and how it will end.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.