The film combines live-action with stop-motion animation, and is distinguished by its dark production design.

For Švankmajer, a prolific director of short films for more than two decades, Alice became his first venture into feature-length filmmaking.

Alice hides beneath a writing desk while the Rabbit comes alive, dressing himself and retrieving a pair of scissors from a hidden drawer, which he uses to smash the case, freeing himself.

Alice chases the Rabbit into a writing desk on top of a hill; crawling into the drawer after him, she soon finds herself in a cellar.

She falls backwards into a dustbin and finds herself in an elevator that takes her past all sorts of objects on shelves.

She then finds a butter tart that causes her to grow large, again rendering her unable to fit through the door.

Once through the door, Alice finds herself at the banks of a brook and encounters the White Rabbit, who mistakes her for his maid and commands her to fetch scissors from his house.

Alice follows the sound of a crying baby to a tiny dollhouse, which she enlarges by eating a piece of the mushroom.

The Rabbit escapes while Alice chases the piglet downstairs, where a mechanical tea party is being hosted by a wind-up March Hare and a marionette Hatter.

Around the room are the various household objects that populated her dream: playing cards, china dolls, marionettes, an inkwell, and socks in a sewing basket.

He described Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, a work which had followed him since he was a child, as "one of the most important and amazing books produced by this civilisation.

"[2] He argued that other film adaptations of the story had interpreted it as a fairy tale, but that Carroll had written it like a dream, and that was what he wanted to transmit: "While a fairy tale has got an educational aspect – it works with the moral of the lifted forefinger (good overcomes evil), dream, as an expression of our unconscious, uncompromisingly pursues the realisation of our most secret wishes without considering rational and moral inhibitions, because it is driven by the principle of pleasure.

James described the animation as "remarkably fluid" and held forward the dynamics of the film, which contrasts visually captivating elements with superficiality: "Mr. Švankmajer never lets us forget we are watching a film in which an actress plays Alice telling a story", although, "with its extreme close-ups, its constant motion and its smooth animation, the film is so visually active that it distracts us from a heavy-handed fact – this is a world of symbols come alive.

Horne called it "an astonishing film", and wrote: "This is no cleaned up version approved by preview audiences or committees of studio executives – my youthful fellow-spectator declared quite aptly at one point, 'She's rather a violent young girl, isn't she?'