The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb is a British 1993 animated dystopian/horror/science-fiction/fantasy film by Dave Borthwick.
The plot is a horror re-imagining of the fairy tale of Tom Thumb, in which Tom is abducted from loving parents and taken to a laboratory for study, from which he must escape. The film features themes of rebirth, tolerance, ethics in science, and experimentation on humans and animals.
The film is fast-paced, almost completely void of dialogue and it's safe to say that this film can be easily compared to the works of Jan Švankmajer for it's surrealistic nature, so surrealistic in fact, that it uses pixilation (stop-motion using human actors instead of plasticine figures) to make the human actors physically interact with the claymation models. It is because of this unsettling imagery that it makes other surrealistic films, such as Eraserhead, look like a walk in the park.
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb features examples of:
- Barbarian Tribe: Tom encounters a tribe of miniature, primitive people who murder his friend because of its hideous appearance.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: The human characters are seeing interacting with, killing, and eating giant insects and spiders, eat plates of live fish and what appear to be live slugs or leeches, and everything is covered with flies.
- Bittersweet Ending: Like they say in the song "In Heaven, everything is fine." Jack succeeds at destroying the core and Tom is flung into Heaven where he lives as a normal baby to his parents in a bright and pristine world. Mr. and Mrs. Thumb are even dressed fancy too. However, the presence of 10 flies forming some kind of halo around Tom's head suggests that the nightmare may not be over just yet.
- Body Horror: Several characters have horrific deformities and unsettling anatomy.
- Tom resembles less an actual human baby and more an alien fetus that was born prematurely. Justified due to a mosquito getting into his insemination jar.
- The creature that helps Tom escape has a skeletal face.
- Jack may look like a handsome young man, but his face is somewhat close to that of an ape's.
- Crapsack World: Crapsack mainly in the sense of having a world that brings Brazil (1985) to mind. Aside from Tom, there are no children to be seen, the world is run down and infested with insects and some objects like the bowling pins are sentient. Did I mention that some of the food is alive? Yuck!
- Crucified Hero Shot: Several Christian motifs appear throughout the film, mostly in the form of pictures or other wall ornaments, possibly intended as allegory or satire. One of them is a sculpture of Father Christmas being crucified.
- Fetus Terrible: In a twisted take on the fairytale, Tom's appearance seems to be modelled on a foetus.
- The Grotesque: None of the characters seem to be intended as attractive, but the most repulsive is a creature made from electrical components and a flayed rat's skull encountered by Tom in the lab. The creature turns out to be a kindly ally who aids his escape, but is tragically murdered by an intolerant mob revolted by its appearance.
- Escape from the Crazy Place: Tom and a friend have to escape from a sinister laboratory filled with grotesque monsters.
- Ghost City: Very few people seem to live in the city where the Thumbs live despite the insemination factory.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Tom's birth, the horrific experiments, society in general in a dystopian world.
- Killed Offscreen: Tom's mother.
- Mad Scientist Laboratory: Tom is abducted from his parents and taken to one to be studied.
- Mercy Kill: Dissected specimens, human body parts, and amorphous monsters in glassware helplessly indicate a switch they want Tom to operate. When he does as they ask, it cuts off the power supply keeping them alive.
- Mind Screw: Well, it is kinda surrealistic after all.
- Noble Savage: A miniature warrior man with a Neanderthal appearance befriends Tom after Tom's friend from the lab is killed by other members of his tribe.
- Played for Horror: The classic Tom Thumb fairytale is turned into a Surreal Horror Urban Fantasy film with harsh, squalid environments; giant bugs and creatures crawling everywhere; violence, death and experimentation as major plot points and a dark Mind Screw ending involving a nuclear reactor exploding and killing everyone. Also, Tom Thumb himself looks like a fetus.
- Reset Button: The ending involves Tom and his companion destroying an object which apparently functions as a cosmic reset, allowing him to be reborn as a normal child to his original parents, in a setting that looks more hygienic, but is still infested with flies.
- Scenery Gorn: The rugged and dystopian landscape is one of the film's biggest strengths.
- Senseless Sacrifice: Tom's father is reunited with him, but subsequently dies pointlessly in a brawl.
- Silent Movie: Largely so, with occasional spoken words.
- Stop Motion: Filmed using a combination of Plasticene and pixilation.