WELCOME TO THE DROLL WORLD OF TODD SOLONDZ.

Byline: Henry Sheehan Orange County Register

When ``Welcome to the Dollhouse,'' which opened Friday, won top honors at the most recent Sundance Film Festival, it was because of its obvious artistry and empathy. With its story of an 11-year-old seventh-grader who is the ultimate outsider at her suburban New Jersey junior high school, the R-rated movie was hailed for its combination of pathos and almost gallows humor.

But there also was marveling that the movie even existed. Writer-producer-director Todd Solondz had done the unthinkable, not just charting the cruelties and humiliations of pubescence, but doing it with a dose of irony that made many of the scenes simultaneously painful and funny.

How did Solondz, who had one unhappy experience with Hollywood, a 1989 feature called ``Fear, Anxiety, and Depression,'' under his belt, ever think he could get such a daring project made?

Well, according to the 36-year-old filmmaker, he didn't.

``I wrote it seven years ago just because I wanted to write it - for the same reason you write anything, I suppose,'' he says. ``But while writing, I didn't believe anyone would ever make it. I didn't feel so much a pessimist as a realist. I'd be a fool to approach any studio or serious production company; who would invest in a movie about a little girl who gets picked on at school? I myself would not have banked on this project - maybe as a donation, but certainly not as an investment. Of course, I've been proven wrong. Somehow things have worked out in ways unanticipated, by me most of all, perhaps. Just all of a sudden, luck has come my way.''

Solondz got to make the movie when a lawyer friend told him she had just enough money to produce a film. But while making a movie independently in New Jersey was a ``horrible'' experience filled with stress, as Solondz says, that independence allowed him to make exactly the movie he wanted. That is, with an honest depiction of the brutality sent the way of Dawn Wiener, the movie's heroine, but done specifically from an adult perspective, one that necessarily entailed irony and black humor.

``I want it both ways,'' Solondz says. ``On the one hand, if I write something, I have to be emotionally connected to what's going in and invested in it. And I'm invested in several of these characters here. There's as much of me in Dawn as there is in the movie's bully and her older brother. I do connect there. But at the same time, I can't help but have an ironic take on all of this. I couldn't tell this story without humor; it would be unbearable, and it wouldn't interest me. It's because I as an adult can find so much that is so moving and sad, yet so funny at the same time. That's just what draws me in.''

Solondz also wanted the characters to be as complex as the movie's tone. Dawn is mostly treated badly, but she occasionally is cruel to others as well. Cookie, a cheerleader character, torments Dawn, but she has her own unhappiness to deal with. And one of Dawn's chief tormentors, a bully, turns out to be her salvation in a way.

``It's not the story of a victim,'' the filmmaker says. ``That doesn't interest me because there's no room for any complexity there. The persecuted and the persecutor reside within each of us. It's circumstances that dictate to what degree we will experience one or the other or both. But I think we all do experience them all as part of growing up. I think every writer in a certain sense wants to explore childhood. That's the mother lode of what shapes our adult lives, so to speak.''

But what would provoke Solondz to make a movie about the persecutions of childhood in the first place? Although he admits that his own experience in seventh grade was less than great, it wasn't something he ever brooded about.

``The catalyst was an episode I saw on `The Wonder Years,' a very popular TV show,'' Solondz says. ``I was struck by it, because I happened to grow up around the show's time period. I thought further about it, and I couldn't think of any American films that dealt seriously with childhood. Children tend to be portrayed as cute, petlike dolls or, on the other hand, as evil demon monsters. It's either one or the other; it's hard to find those instances in which they are in fact human beings, people that are in the process of struggling to figure out how to grow up. So I wanted to address that. I felt the terrain was fertile.''

In particular, Solondz felt girls got a rough ride in the movies.

``I had made a short film already about an 11-year-old boy,'' he says. ``Even though it was a short, eight-minute movie, and a different kind of character and a different kind of story, I didn't want to retread. But more importantly, I do think that girls do mature in certain key ways faster than boys. I felt there was more room for a kind of romantic dimension; yearnings would be taken more seriously and wouldn't be deemed or perceived as cute.

``Also, movies with little-girl protagonists are box-office poison, so it is the perversity in my nature that rose up to the challenge, I suppose. When you think of a movie with a little girl having difficulties, it's sort of a hallmark of a student film. A little girl doesn't get attention from her mother, runs away, makes a friend - you see these kinds of student films all the time. Maybe part of me was saying, `I'll give you one with a real character that age.' Because they are almost always so abysmal, so boring. I felt they've only done boring movies with little girls.

``Of course, they have a sensitivity, just like little boys, but you don't have to handle them with kid gloves. You have to recognize the fullness of what little girls and little boys are about. They're not just about selling Girl Scout cookies.''

As is often the case with movies that are presumed ``difficult,'' ``Welcome to the Dollhouse'' hasn't been just a critical or festival favorite; it has won over general audiences as well. Solondz himself has been taken aback by how many people seem to identify with the harassed Dawn.

At other times, people have reacted so harshly against Dawn's plight that they don't see the humor at all.

``Some people only understand comedy when it's spelled with a K, '' Solondz explains. ``I don't have to laugh at something to find it funny.''

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Photo: ``I myself would not have banked on this project,''director Todd Solondz says of the improbable success of ``Welcome to the Dollhouse.''