Rating: 
Summary: Original, witty and horrific
Review: "Once upon a time there lived a woodcutter and his wife who longed for a little baby..." That's how so many fairytales start and in this extraordinary, disturbing and witty film the fairytale is brought to life not in some suitably fairy-tale setting (as was the case in e.g. Cocteau's "La Belle et La Bete" or Jordan's "Company of Wolves") but in a dingy block of urban flats in central Europe. Here we find the childless, no longer so young, Bozena and Karel who are both hopelessly infertile and wholly in despair. But Karel digs up an old tree stump which looks a bit like a baby, cuts it up a bit to make the resemblance closer and gives it to his wife as a rather sick joke. Immediately, to his horror, she sets about loving it. She even sets up an elaborate fake pregnancy for herself so she can present it in public as her baby - though she soon learns that, given its appearance, she can't very easily do any such thing. Then after she has "given birth", Karel returns home to find the tree stump, named Otik, has somehow become alive and is hungrily suckling at his wife's breast. He wants to cut it to pieces with an axe but she desperately prevents him and they continue to feed it. It grows rapidly bigger and bigger and hungrier and hungrier. In a wonderfully horrible scene it attacks Bozena by grabbing her hair in its teeth. Then it eats their cat. Then it eats the postman. A social worker is sent round and asks to see the baby. "Don't be afraid, I'm not going to eat him", she says. Indeed, au contraire...The dramatic centre of the film is not any of the characters so far mentioned so much as it is Alzbetka, the little girl next door, beautifully played by Kristina Adamcova. She has a precociously strong interest in everything to do with reproduction and motherhood and assiduously reads books on sex and obstetrics hidden inside the covers of fairy tale collections to evade the notice of her stuffy and anxious father. No one is quite as interested as Alzbetka in the parental lives of Karel and Bozena and soon she is the only person really alive to what is happening next door. But rather than being afraid of the monster she now has for a neighbour her attitude to it becomes maternal and protective... If you like monster movies and fancy checking out something a bit different this is a good place to come. Indeed it is so enormously different that it is worth checking out if you ordinarily hate monster movies but are open to anything remarkable and imaginative. It's an excellent movie, though perhaps a little bit too long for so simple a tale and the end is a little slow coming. But the first half in particular, charting the surreal nightmare of Bozena's growing madness and then the horror of the suddenly living and feeding Otik is marvellous. Svankmajer doesn't have a monster-sized Hollywood special effects budget to create Otik but he does have a distinguished history as an animator and uses animation techniques to make something magnificantly creepy and horrible. Sometimes one is reminded of the hideous infant from Lynch's "Eraserhead" but really Svankmajer's Otik is like nothing else, a hideous confusion of roots and teeth. It might give you nightmares.
Rating: 
Summary: Mother love.
Review: 'Little Otik' tells its story from two female perspectives. The first is that of a young wife who, infertile like her husband, is depressed because she is childless. Buying a rural allotment to take their minds off their plight, the husband, in a moment of apocalyptic stupidity, digs up an old root and jokingly carves it into the shape of a baby. The mother, far from laughing, transfers all her pent-up maternal feelings onto the stump, even going so far as faking a pregnancy for the neighbours, wearing specially sized cushions each month. Mrs Horakova is an adult who regresses into childhood, who replaces the intolerableness of reality with fantasy and play, make-believing motherhood just as a child plays with its dolls. The other primary viewpoint in the film belongs to Alzbetha, whose family lives facing the Horaks in a glum Prague tenement. Her development is in the opposite direction, from child to adult. A sturdy eleven-year-old, she is becoming a sexual creature, regularly ogled by the paedophile janitor, hiding sex-education books in a volume of fairy tales, dodging the blows of a comically brutal dad who freaks out every time his little girl declaims something 'adult'. Where Mrs. Horakova tries to hide reality, Alzbetha attempts to discover knowledge - she is a detective figure reading the clues of weirdness and death being left by her neighbours. It is almost as if knowledge is too much for women to bear, though, because discovery causes her moment of regress, and she replaces Mrs. Horakova as the wood's mother, resorting to increasingly desperate tactics to feed it. Because by this atage Otik has become an enormous, insatiable child, feeding on humans to sustain itself. Facing each other like mirror reflections, these two households offer bizarre distortions on the idea of the family unit. 'Little Otik' is filmed with an austere but grotesque realism, with a shabby, small-minded Czech milieu not so different from the dank settings of Svankmajer's Communist-era films. Huge close-ups focus in on faces expresing (usually gross) appetite, whether for food, drink, sex, reassurance, family, knowledge or love. Equal prominence is given to things, especially food, whose sticky, lumpy liquidity becomes a uteral/infant displacement in a series of provocative visual puns. There are fantasies at the beginning of the film - such as when Mr. Horak sees babies everywhere, being sold like fish at a street market, or enwombed in a watermelon - but they are clearly signalled as such, as unreal as the violently unsubtle advertising that Alzbetha's couch potato father watches, usually for products that require no human input. Svankmajer's trademark puppetry is kept to a minimum, and, except in one case, is used to express character subjectivity (the girl eyeing the bulging trousers of the paedophile; her father witnessing live nails in his soup). That one exception is little Otik himself, who is given life by the sheer force of his mother's desire, and is sustained by the collusion of the little girl. He is created by the father, and the film adds Frankenstein/Golem/Genesis resonances to its Kafka and fairy tale structure - but it is lifeless until the mother succours it. It is the two women who make it real, who displace drab and unjust reality with an all-consuming, murderous fantasy (it is significant that 'truth' is uncovered by reference to a folk tale). Fertility distorted devours all that surrounds it. The void of denial is filled by a monster who, through appetite, literally creates absence (appropriately, his victims represent authority, bureaucratic, generational and filial). I'm sure this is an allegory of some sort for modern Czech consumerism - as in Haneke's 'The Seventh Continent', a family unit is driven to ruthless besiege isself - but the relentless allusions to the director's previous film, the dark fairy tale mirror-worlds of 'Alice' and 'Down In The Cellar' expecially, suggest that the director is once more interested in burrowing the unexplored recesses of the mind, body and imagination. The result is his most uncomfortable and funny film in years.
Rating:
Summary: Family Tree, Redefined
Review: A Czech folk tale is given a psychological and socially satirical slant in this twisted and highly humorous piece of Euro-Cinema. Childless couple Karel and Bozena are given a shot at parenthood when hubby Karel presents his despondent wife with a (sort of) human-shaped tree root, in an attempt to amuse her. He regrets the act almost immediately when she snatches the gift, dresses it up, and begins to treat it like a real infant. In the time that follows, she stages an elaborate fake pregnancy, culminating in a ritualized "birth", and the little one is given the name Otik. To his horror, Bozena's husband arrives one evening to find her nursing the child, which has actually come to life. And it is very, insatiably hungry. A neighbor's daughter, inquisitive Alzbekta, knows something is up from the couple's strange behavior, and from the way visitors begin to mysteriously disappear. Amongst the books on human development and sexuality she peruses, she finds in a book of Fairy Tales the fable of Otesanek, a hungry tree monster, and ends up being the only character in the developing, horrific scenario who has a clue what is going on, as well as what is to ensue. This movie has been compared to The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby and Eraserhead; I would have to throw in nods to It's Alive, Little Shop of Horrors ('61) and maybe Delicatessen. Despite the overly broad humor, somewhat primitive, jerky animation style and a rather unsatisfying ending, Little Otik delivers some good sick fun in this sidewise view of parenting and consumerism. One may never look at food quite the same way again.
Rating:
Summary: No spoilers here...
Review: Anyone familiar with Jan Svanky's work already knows they'll love this from the box art alone. For those who are not, however, this is the perfect entry-level Svank film; this is rather tame compared to his other works, which is the only reason I give it 4 out of 5 stars. I like my Svank on far side of surreal.
It is a modern retelling of a classic Czech folk tale, and, like many such old stories, is quite disturbing on many levels. We in the west have fallen victim to disneyfication with most of our legends, a process through whcih most of them have lost much of their meaning, and all of their flavor.
Svankmeier has recognized this unpleasant trend, and subsequently has dedicated much of his recent films towards rekindling the surreal embers of our oral memories. Though you may not be familiar with the tale of little Otik, the journey of discovering who, or what, he is and what he represents to humanity is a genuine trip, one that should not be missed. If you maintain your sanity after viewing this, then get ready because the ride has just begun. I recommend moving on to Jan's other retellings, notably Alice and Faust.
Rating:
Summary: No spoilers here...
Review: Anyone familiar with Jan Svanky's work already knows they'll love this from the box art alone. For those who are not, however, this is the perfect entry-level Svank film; this is rather tame compared to his other works, which is the only reason I give it 4 out of 5 stars. I like my Svank on far side of surreal.
It is a modern retelling of a classic Czech folk tale, and, like many such old stories, is quite disturbing on many levels. We in the west have fallen victim to disneyfication with most of our legends, a process through whcih most of them have lost much of their meaning, and all of their flavor.
Svankmeier has recognized this unpleasant trend, and subsequently has dedicated much of his recent films towards rekindling the surreal embers of our oral memories. Though you may not be familiar with the tale of little Otik, the journey of discovering who, or what, he is and what he represents to humanity is a genuine trip, one that should not be missed. If you maintain your sanity after viewing this, then get ready because the ride has just begun. I recommend moving on to Jan's other retellings, notably Alice and Faust.
Rating: 
Summary: Admirably bizarre mess
Review: I can't say I was ever truly into this film. It's overlong, far too repetitive, and falls completely apart towards the end. But it's just too weird and too interesting and gutsy to say it is without merit, and the film is very good right up until Otik starts eating more than he should. As soon as the girl who lives next door begins dominating the proceedings, things get a little less interesting. Though even this turn has its benefits; the girl's parents get more screen time, and the actors playing them are both wonderful. I can't necessarily recommend it without reservation, and I won't see it again, but I'm glad I checked it out.
Rating:
Summary: Homebrewer
Review: I knew I had to see this movie when I saw a picture of Little Otik, the misshapen cannibal log baby! I expected it to be an strange romp through fairy tales and stop motion, similar to Svankmeyer's other movies like ALICE and FAUST [Which i love]. And it was... only LITTLE OTIK was a little less zany, was more plot-driven, and had fewer stop motion sequences. So I didn't like it was much as FAUST, but it was still unbelievable.
Other reviews can fill you in on the plot if you really need to hear about it, but basically a childless couple "gives birth" to a piece of wood shaped like a baby. The wood baby comes alive...and boy does it like to eat.
LITTLE OTIK's tone is humorously dreary, in an understated way. I especially appreciated the kitchen table scenes where the mother forces her family to eat nasty soup. Jan Svankmeyer really loves to accentuate slurping and belching noises, too. These are some of the most disgusting meal scenes I have ever seen in a movie.
While this movie has more dialogue than a typical Svankmeyer film, much of the story is still told through pictures rather than words. I found a lot of the pregnancy imagery to be pretty well-done, like the juxtaposition of pictures from the little girl's sex-ed book with footage of the father cutting down the tree which will become Otik. You don't realize the significance of that montage until after Otik is born, then it all makes sense.
There are a few negative sides to the movie. For instance, I wasn't such a big fan of the parts where the girl reads the fairy tale out loud we see pictures of it. A similar device worked in Alice but was kind of needless here, since no one watching the movie would really need the plot spelled out for them, at least not in such detail. I mean, all we need to know is that there's a legend, that the girl is familiar with it, and that the cabbage patch will play a big part in the story. Now, if the folk tale had been shown in stop motion, I would have loved it!!
Also, I got a little weary of the constant close ups, especially of peoples mouths. And as others have noted, the movie ran about 20 minutes too long. Probably some of the pregnancy footage in the first act could have been edited.
Overall my criticisms are few! I'm glad I saw this movie and would definitely recommend it to other Svankmeyer fans!! Enjoy this one on me.
Rating:
Summary: Jan Svankmajer
Review: If your a fan of Svankmajer's work, then you can't miss this movie. It's a quirky little story constructed from an old fairytale. As odd as this movie is, I think it might be the most conventional Svankmajer film I've seen, but no less amazing than the others.
Rating:
Summary: A fairy tale come to life
Review: It's not one of the happy fairy tales, either, more like those Brothers Grimm stories that people don't read to kids. Also, the fairy tale has moved into a gritty, grubby urban setting.
The Horaks, Karel and his wife, desperately want a baby but can never have one of their own. Gepetto-like, Karel creates a doll from a piece of wood, and the doll comes to life. Otik isn't a cute little Pinocchio, though, it's a monster that shatters his "mother's" mind and takes over the Horaks' lives.
The little girl next door, Alzbetka somehow becomes the narrator and muse of the story. She controls the story twards the end, and sets the stage for the fairy-tale finish - but don't look for a "happily ever after."
Svankmajer's stop-action animation is only a small part of this movie, and a little rough and jerky at times. It is very expressive, though, and that its real purpose. It works well with the live actors and scenes to create a strong, consistent visual experience.
I've never seen Svankmajer's work before. After this dark but enjoyable introduction, I look forward to seeing a lot more.
//wiredweird
Rating: 
Summary: Overlong and conceptually thin.
Review: Karel is husband to a childless and melancholy wife, Bozena. One day he cuts down a tree and pulls the stump out of the ground with his own hands. Karel finds that the stump is shaped surprisingly like a small human figure. After a little pruning and a coat of varnish, he presents it to Bozena as a joke. Much to his horror, she adopts it as her own child. They take the creature home to their apartment and hide it from the neighbors. Soon, however, the creature begins to behave like a growing child and acquires a voracious appetite. A curious young neighbor girl, Alzbetka, becomes concerned when she realizes that the scenario is described, in detail, in her book of fairy tales. In "Little Otik," or "Otesanek," Jan Svankmajer continues his recent and surprising trend to give more screen time to straight live action scenes, using his moments of stop-motion surrealism as a side dish (or dessert, as in "Conspirators of Pleasure") rather than as a main course. The surreal sequences are excellent, if few and far between. Unfortunately, Svankmajer seems reluctant to show the growing Otik in his full glory later in the film. This is disappointing not only because the audience is denied the typical indulgence in Svankmajer's plastic artistry, but also because the film rests entirely on the problem of Otik's appearance. There is really nothing else to drive the story. As usual in a Svankmajer film, the characters are fleshy puppets, and the plot is incidental--neither element is able to provide the film with any narrative momentum. Running over 2 hours, "Little Otik" is by far the longest of Svankmajer's features. It is also tells a very linear story and manages to be his most accessible film. Unfortunately, though Svankmajer teases us with inspired moments, he allows his story to drag, and it never quite transports us to the sort of hidden, magical world achieved in "Alice" and "Faust."
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