Very disappointing...

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

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!

I think it'd be fairly safe to say that Jan Svankmajer's 2000 Czech film Little Otik will be unlike most things, indeed anything, that you've ever previously seen; the film a quite mad but gloriously creative, often blackly amusing and frankly rather scary piece blurring lines between realism and surrealism whilst taking on a great deal of social satire and keeping a wholly self-aware eye on proceedings. I rather like films grounded within realistic enough realms covering people whom happen to stumble upon an otherworldly presence; a presence that arrives with its own infrastructure and makeup before just being let loose amidst the people and their problems with which we spent the opening. Little Otik is one of these films. If one were permitted to use hindsight, one might compare it favourably to a recent Canadian film entitled Splice; a film about those we sensed could exist and were going through the motions in life which came with some very real, very personal problems – both projects ending up happening to have this somewhat beastly, rather monstrous creation of an uncanny nature just crash land into proceedings mixing things up and allowing such a presence to act as the catalyst for a greater extent of dramatic content.The film eventually comes to follow the misadventures to that of Alzbetka (Adamcová), a young teen-aged girl living with her mother and father but, crucially, without siblings, in a humble part of the Czech Republic amidst several other patrons in a tower block. Her presence is one of a supporting act initially, the acts and experiences of certain neighbours paving way for her greater involvement. Alzbetka's life is one of a carefree and somewhat boisterous nature; the charging down the narrow stone stairwell in the process of chasing a ball, even when it bounds out of the main entrance and into the road thus nearly leading to tragedy, alluding to an energetic and adventurous person; something that goes hand in hand with what is a distinct characteristic of curiosity - the reading of certain books on contraception another of her little hobbies but one of which is frowned upon by a father, whom looks more temperamental than he probably is.In the mean time, neighbouring married couple Karel (Hartl) and Božena Horák (Zilková) cannot conceive; Karel's job as a doctor seeing him come into contact on occasion with an array of pregnant women whom he must aid and treat forcing him into working with, on a professional level, what it is he cannot aid or work with on a personal level. He glances out of his office window, daytime hallucinations alluding to a greater extent of frustration bordering on mental illness when he 'observes' arrays of newborns being handed out as if an exchange at a market stall highlighting his perception of everybody else's apparent ease as to which to garner a child. The Horák's secluded retreat, merely a shack with a small garden away form the bustle of the town, acts as the locale in which an event straddling that line between what could be perceived as a miracle or a curse occurs; the uprooting of a rogue tree stump, and the mock caring for it as if it were a newborn, seeing Božena forcefully tear everything off of a table so as to make room to cater for it such is her desperation to play the mothering role. It's here the film leaps from its Czech working class foundations and into some other realm; this caring, against all odds, eventually giving way the damned chunk of wood coming alive and adopting human baby-like characteristics: the titular Otik. The situation at once calls to mind the likes of the famous Pinocchio fairy tale and, given the premise of the mother's maternity situation plus shack-like locale, the coming of Christ as this miracle birth unfolds.Despite the high concept, not for one second does director Svankmajer deviate from the giddiness of such a selling point, nor other necessary proceedings, and allow for the item overbearing all to act as the sole focal point. Such an action would render the film a freak show; rather, the integration of the concept to act as a band around which deeper studies of character frameworks; observations on morals and social commentary as well as the hybridising of genres are allowed to play out. Take, for instance, Michael Bay's 2007 science-fiction film Transformers; a piece which cannot get past the fact it has, at the core of it, machines capable of turning from an everyday piece of machinery into a large robot - as a result, becomes so overwhelmed by its U.S.P. or essential premise that it submits to the continual gratification of the idea leading onto a mess of character study and genre demands trailing miles behind.The film's morphing into this odd meshing of serial-killer sub-genre conventions as people in the block go missing blends well with the constant questions of ethics the parents ask themselves in relation to killing it; caring for it and keeping it a secret. Alzbetka's role as that of a supporting act is gradually manoeuvred, impressively, into a more recurrent character whose strand is at once an interesting tale of detection later playing more as a tragedy. With this, the film is peppered with a wry commentary on the Americanised, consumerism driven lifestyle that has seemingly infiltrated this, an apartment block acting as an epitomisation of Czech living, via a series of televised advertisements; advertisements speaking of products promising much which consist of shots dissolving into actual physical incarnations of the things malfunctioning in the home. Svankmajer's film, a body horror in which characters venture out to see a body horror movie and then come home criticising it, is a knotting of several codes and genres together to produce something at once gleefully original and impressively played.

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.

Karl Horak and his wife Bozhena are unable to have a child;the man carves a stump of wood into something that resembles a baby,and little Otik comes to life.Bozhena loves it with all she has and they name Otik.But Otik's appetite grows and grows,it soon devouring the cat,the postman and neighbors.Only the neighbor's inquisitive daughter realizes that the Horak's have given birth to an Otesanek,a creature from fairytale that supposedly grew in size devouring everything around it."Little Otik" by Jan Svankmajer is a wickedly humorous film.Svankmajer's traditional obsession with rampant consumerism and folk tales is clearly visible.Veronika Zilkova gives an absolutely hilarious performance,treating the piece of wood as though it were a baby with steadfast certainty-bathing it,clipping its nails,changing its diapers,rubbing cream on its butt.A must-see for fans of surreal world of Jan Svankmajer.