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.

Suspension of Reality (Rating: 4.00)
Review : This film suspended reality for me - I was entranced - the stop-motion technique alone lends to the eery feeling little Otesanek brings to the screen. I began to understand this woman's obsession with having a child - and how she would covet this tree trunk... am I mad??? Fabulous recreation of a disturbing fairy tale.

Original, witty and horrific (Rating: 5.00)
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.