[7.5/10] Ply me with your dreams. Sate me with your weirdness. Wow me with the images you conjure on the silver screen.

For most movies and television shows, I need to be enamored with the characters, engrossed in the story, compelled by the plot. But there’s a weird button within me, one that can be pushed by something surreal and singular enough that even if it’s little more than a slapped-together mood piece, I will gladly be along for the ride.

*The City of Lost Children* fits that to a tee. There’s is a convoluted plot at the center, involving kidnapped children and an ensuing rescue mission, a hidden enclave of oddballs trying to allow their master to dream, and a cadre of street urchins finding friend and foe among retired circus performers. And there are characters, like the lovable lunk “One”, his young orphan ally Miette, or the villainous dream-seeker, Krank.

But both feel besides the point. The plot holds together, more or less, if put the pieces together and care enough to untangle the various story threads introduced and dispensed with seemingly at random. And yet it doesn't so much drive the action as it provides an excuse for the weirdness and wizardry at the movie’s core. The same goes for the major personalities in the film, who have the depth of a dribble cup, but who seem to represent more of a tone or an idea, figures to be posed upon a diorama to make meaning, than used for their grand journeys.

Man, what a diorama though. Directors Marc Caro and Jean Pierre Jeunet craft a dingy, storybook world of mundane fantasy, oozing imaginative science, and steampunk technology that leaps off the screen. The setting and style has the dada-ist aesthetic of Terry Gilliam in *Brazil*, or a grungier take on the storybook aesthetic of a Tim Burton film. Their inventive recreation of an exaggerated city slum, flanked by bizarre characters and byzantine plotters, is worth the price of admission alone.

Say what you will about *The City of Lost Children*, but my word does it have a sense of place. From the assorted former circus acts who dot the landscape with hidden tangles of relationships and old grudges, to the cyclops men who are positively Borg-like in their mechanical affectations and Cult-like in their devotion, to the misfit toys hovering around Krank’s oil rig laboratory. Query whether Caro and Jeunet can come up with a story worthy of the setting, but don’t doubt how quickly the titular city feels like a distinctive, well-formed place, with its own rules and inhabitants and outrageous idiosyncracies that gesture toward more than what we see.

The phrase “tone poem” gets thrown around a lot for these sorts of movies, but it applies to pieces that represent more a mastery of mood and sensibility than an of any narrative propulsiveness or deep characters. The directors give away the game in the first scene, which turns a sweet, if somewhat off, scene of yuletide joy and excitement into a terrifying surfeit of santas, swirling the images on the screen and let the audio warp and wobble until the result is positively menacing, like the faithfully-transcribed nightmare that it is.

Indeed, that’s what *The City of Lost Children* is most adept at, capturing the unmooring unreality of dreams. That’s true for the moments when we penetrate Krank’s skull, as he tethers himself to young children in the hope of channeling their reveries for himself. People grow young and old in and instant; doors and hallways move and transmogrify; cause and effect become inverted and meaningless. But it’s also true in the film’s waking world, where rube goldberg developments and emotion-driven causality give the plot a dream-like quality even when we’re not dealing with an army of Kris Kringles.

Granted, too much of that can be overwhelming. The biggest knock against the film is that it’s a lot to take in one sitting. The pacing of the movie isn’t exactly energetic, and it can be easy to overdose on the in-your-face strangeness and outsized presentation of the film for two hours straight. I’ll cop to taking a break between the first half and the second, and found it easier to recharge and appreciate the world of the film with the breather.

But what drew me back is the direction and cinematography and editing in this. Caro and Jeunet fill their movie with distinctive-looking individuals, moving and gazing and gesticulating in distinctive ways, and take the time to shoot them from striking angles and perspectives. The camera may suddenly switch the point of view of a flea, or give a bird’s eye view of our heroes in peril, or zoom close with a fish-eye lens on something or someone grotesque. Or it may fall back on the stark image of a young girl and her burly protector, rowing to danger or safety above ooze-green water, as the villain’s lair looms in the distance.

It also makes incredibly impressive use of CGI for 1995. Sometimes the seams show, but special effects like the deadly flee itself, or the technology where characters morph between older and younger versions of themselves, work almost as well twenty-five years later as when they first were unveiled. Part of that stems from the artifice at play throughout the movie, but the marriage between technology and aesthetic absolutely clicks here. It’s a film you could watch without dialogue, without sound, and still comprehend through what it accomplishes visually.

Thematically, *The City of Lost Children* reaches for a certain innocence -- one that bonds Miniette and One despite their ages, one that One hopes to preserve by rescuing his little brother, and one that Krank is desperate to gain, having been made without it and ravenous for a taste. So much of the film feels like it’s from the perspective of a child, afraid of having lost a sibling, of losing themselves, on missing out on the things that let them be a child, expressed through the outsized lens that Caro and Jeunet apply.

It’s a lens that tracks in the strange, the ridiculousness, and the extreme, but which also thrives there. There’s not much to follow in *The City of Lost Children*, more a carnival of sui generis faces and places grasping for the liminal. But that brand of strangeness feeds something in viewers like me, struck by the cavalcade of the bizarre and imaginative, that moves us with moods more than it makes it any sense.