The film deals loosely with the adventures of the grizzled Gustav who captains a ship – a giant floating ‘snailboat’ – with a crew of talking animals and lumbering sailors in blackface. It unspools like a perverse children’s story book, all at once cuddly cute, grotesquely obscene and beyond absurd as normal narrative logic shatters, giving way to an episodic, free-associative structure that one critic likened to “cinematic memory association.” (joergbuttgereit.com)

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