Czechoslovak animator extraordinaire, Jan has been making intensely bizarre films since the mid-'60s. Most of his work is a mix between 3-D stop-motion animation, puppets and live-action, but it can involve any mix of the above. His stories are eerie, delightful, and surreal. His actors include real people, machines, socks, clay figures, antique dolls, pencil sharpeners, and skeletons or stuffed corpses of animals, among other things. His sets are usually decaying Czech buildings or landscapes, decorated with waste of the industrial age: rotting furniture, rusty nails, sawdust, oily screws, and the like. An excellent introduction to his work is Jan Svankmajer's Alice , a wonderfully creepy take on Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice is played by a real girl who enters a typical decaying Svankmeyer world. When Alice shrinks, the girl is played by an antique doll. The white rabbit is a stuffed real rabbit, who stores his watch in a hole in his chest, which is always leaking saw dust. The film diverges quite a bit from the story, although most of the elements are there. This is definitely not for small chil dren, unless you want them sleeping with you for a few nights after.