The Walrus and the Carpenter haven't popped up again in the different adaptations we've seen, so instead I'll look at consumption more generally in Švankmajer's version.
What I find interesting in Švankmajer's adaptation is that eating is treated with a certain level of disgust and horror right on the surface. Upon opening the first desk, Alice pricks her finger and it bleeds. Her reaction to the blood is typical for a child: she licks it off her finger. But only moments earlier, she had watched as the White Rabbit removed his pocket watch from his stomach and licked off the sawdust that coated it, an act he repeats several times throughout the film. Later we see him eating sawdust as if it were a meal, and he seems to be enjoying it. The sawdust, of course, is his lifeblood, that which fills him and keeps him whole. After Alice scares him off she tries some of the sawdust herself, but spits it out in disgust. This Alice is not meant to consume the blood of others, only her own.
On Alice’s way down the rabbit hole (or elevator shaft), she pulls down a jar of something. Unlike in the original text, the jar is full, but what it contains looks so thoroughly disgusting that Alice, after dipping her finger into it, decides against eating it. This is the same finger she had just licked her blood from, but this new substance is clearly worse than blood.
The next foodstuffs she encounters she must eat, in order to change her size, but she certainly doesn’t seem to enjoy it. After drinking the inky potion and shrinking, she hurls the bottle into a corner of the room. Once she has had a bite of the dry-looking biscuit, she does the same. What is Švankmajer saying about food and about Alice? As she follows the White Rabbit, she seems to be on a hunt for blood, though she knows she can’t eat his. He certainly regards her as a predator, scampering off whenever she makes her presence know. Like a predator, she rarely shows an emotion other than irritation, and persists in the chase.
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