It's hard to be original.
For the follow-up to their cannibal-themed art-house hit Delicatessen, French directors Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet served up the wildly inventive dark fantasy The City of Lost Children in 1995. Twenty years on, it's just as bizarre and oddly touching as it ever was, with its Rube Goldberg device of a plot about a simple-minded strongman named One (Ron Perlman) and his single-minded search for his "little brother" Denrée (Joseph Lucien) when the boy is abducted by a bitter old man who steals the dreams of children because he can't have any of his own. (Yeah, that old saw again.)
Working on a larger canvas than they had on their first collaboration, Caro and Jeunet (who take responsibility for the artistic direction and mise-en-scène, respectively) and cinematographer Darius Khondji fill every crevice with the most curious collection of cracked characters and cockeyed contraptions this side of Shinya Tsukamoto's filmography. Just in the lair of the dream-deprived Krank (Daniel Emilfork) alone, we're confronted with a half a dozen dimwitted clones (all played by Delicatessen star Dominique Pinon), the diminutive Marthe (Mireille Mossé), and Uncle Irwin, a disembodied brain in a tank voiced by Jean-Louis Trintignant. That's not even taking into account the rubber-raincoated army of Cyclops that does Krank's dirty work for him, or the Octopus (Geneviève Brunet and Odile Mallet), conjoined twins with a pack of pint-sized pickpockets at their beck and call.
One of those pickpockets, incidentally, is the unsentimental Miette (Judith Vittet), who reluctantly teams up with One to help him find Denrée more out of frustration than genuine concern for the boy's well-being. In a lot of ways, their relationship is the glue that binds the film together, along with the extensive effects work that still holds up remarkably well today. This is probably because it's a mix of practical effects and invisible digital compositing, only employing obvious CGI when we're in one of the dreams Krank is stealing, which goes a long way toward excusing the fakery. Then again, fans of Caro and Jeunet's work are accustomed to doing that already.