Little Otik (2000) – A waste of time
Any movie starting with babies being fished up from a tank filled with water, wrapped in newspaper and sold on a fish market catches my immediate attention. But when you’re making a movie lasting over two hours you need a lot more than that.
Root babies and pedophiles
Little Otik is something as bizarre as a Czech suburban adventure-horror stop-motion/feature film.
When a childless couple learn that they cannot have children, it causes great distress. To ease his wife’s pain, the husband finds a root in his backyard and shapes it into a baby and names it Otik.The wife treats it like an ordinary baby, and behold! Nine months later it comes alive. And its appetite is much greater than that of a normal child… After eating them out of the house, the root baby Otik starts eating their cat and then the postman. The little neighbor girl with Asperger syndrome, being followed by an 90 year old pedophile throughout the movie, suspects that there’s something wrong with Otik. And after reading an old fairytale about him she, in a weird inverted version of the Stockholm syndrome, becomes afraid that the old cauliflower farming lady downstairs will kill ‘poor’ Otik.
Scary? No. But an unwanted emphasis on the Czech cuisine and baby genitals? Yes.
Too much soup
Weird Czech cinematography put aside, this could’ve been a very good movie, if it was a hundred minutes shorter. But instead of making a really cool short film, Jan Svankmajer has decided to include about 15 diner scenes of the Asperger girl’s family eating soup. This might have been envisioned as a stroke of artistic geniousnes, but it made me so irritated regarding the ugly little smartass soup-eating Asperger girl I actually found myself cheering on the 90-year-old pedophile at the end.
But besides lasting 100 minutes too long, having an extremely irritating Asperger girl and including a lot of disturbing unmotivated cut scenes with baby genitals; I really enjoyed the movie. The poorly animated stop-motion scenes with Otik is hilarious. And gave me a flashback to the zombie monkey in Braindead.
So what’s the verdict? Little Otik is probably the greatest thing to come out of The Czech Republic since Pat & Mat. It’s something you would enjoy watching along with David Lynch’s dog and a cup of tea. In other words: It’s a really waste of time and the payoff is terrible. But if a 30 minute re-cut comes along, you should see it.
Tags: asperger, baby genitals, Czech, Lynch, pedophile, soup, stop-motion