This disturbing, bleak and at the same time visually incredible take on the story of Tom Thumb takes the audience into a deranged dystopian world full of industrial horrors, repulsive physicality and ubiquitous insects. It is a grim vision build at the the intersection of the extreme fantasies of David Lynch, Jan Švankmajer, Guy Maddin and Phil Tippett, inhabited by heroic little folk, sad mutants, demonic agents, ruthless scientists and hopeless lowlifes. This cinematic Frankenstein’s monster is brought to both beautiful and terrifying life through fantastic animation. In his crowning achievement, director Dave Borthwick gives full rein to his uncompromising ambitions that made Bolex Brothers a sensation in its day, but also inevitably drove the studio into bankruptcy. The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb combines stop motion animation with pixelation. The heightened expressiveness inherent in those animation techniques becomes the main means of expression in this cinematic curiosity, which contains nearly to no dialogue. On the other hand, what use are words when you can let the nightmares hidden in our childhood hearts do the talking?
