It feels like you need more than two eyeballs to take in the dystopian steampunk visual feast of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s second feature. For wit and detail, it rivals the nightworld of Brazil, but with a child’s-eye-view twist. It’s storybook scary and fairy tale dark. The look is all gloom all of the time, but it savors color when it can, from its heroine’s bright red dress to the green glow of the waters that surround the coastal setting.
This is a children’s film, in a way, full of cute little faces and a relaxed take on logic, an uneasy dream without parents or daylight. It was rated R in its original American arthouse run, but would likely be PG-13 today (kids in 2017 aren’t bothered much by a little knife in the eye or a spear through the stomach, right?). Its characters in danger are all very young children. Its villains are adults who want a piece of their innocence. A mad scientist kidnaps toddlers so he can steal their dreams, as he is unable to dream on his own. Then there are the Siamese twin lady crime lords who employ orphans to commit thefts. About the only person over 4’6″ that can be trusted here is Ron Perlman as a good-hearted, primate-like, man-child sideshow strongman.
He’s an innocent, too. When he helps the kids, he’s not a father figure. The kids in this film aren’t looking for that anyway; they want brothers and sisters. That’s why the bond between Perlman and 9-year-old Judith Vittet is strangely not creepy. Also, Perlman seems to have no concept of sex, or even selfish desire of any kind. He’s just a big bag of meat who wants to take care of people. We like him here for many of the same reasons why we like Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster. We know that he means well, no matter what.
Best scene: When a single flying teardrop results in a spectacular series of imaginative Rube Goldberg actions and reactions that bring about the climax.