The White Rabbit is a taxidermied specimen in a glass case that breaks its own wires, dresses itself, and escapes. Alice shrinks into a china doll. Socks become woodworm.

Almost every adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland makes the same mistake: refusing to embrace the book's amoral dream logic and instead trying to impose adult order on a story built to resist it.

Jan Švankmajer understood the tale was a child's dream, and made his version accordingly.

He had spent more than two decades making short films when ALICE became his first feature. Getting it made required considerable ingenuity.

Švankmajer had been banned from filmmaking between 1973 and 1980, and banned again for three years after his short Dimensions of Dialogue won the Golden Bear at Berlin.

He was a member of the Czech Surrealist Group, which had maintained an unbroken existence since the 1930s and refused to dissolve or compromise its activities under Soviet pressure.

Alice was eventually produced under the cover of a Czech-authorised exhibition company, co-funded by Channel 4 and German television, with someone eventually tipping off the authorities - resulting in a standoff between Czech officials and the production.

The film premiered in the West in 1988. It didn't officially premiere in Czechoslovakia until 1990, after the Velvet Revolution.

It opens with Alice saying directly to camera: "Now you will see a film made for children. Perhaps."