The City of Lost Children

Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amélie) and Marc Caro’s film follows a scientist in a surreal city who steals dreams from children, in the hope that they will slow his aging process.

Set in a sci-fi fantasy type world, Krank (Daniel Emilfork), a foul, monstrous creature who lords over the inhabitants of a small island, is as ugly emotionally as he is physically, largely because he does not have the ability to dream. However, he has developed a machine that can drain the dreams of others from their heads, and he devotes himself to kidnapping children from a nearby harbour town so that he can steal their pleasant dreams.

The story continues as Denree (Joseph Lucien) is one of the children who has been spirited off to the island and Krank discovers that he's an even bigger problem than he imagined when his big brother One (Ron Perlman), a harpoon-wielding mountain of a man, sets out on a rescue mission. Along the way One encounters a brain in a fish tank that has learned to talk, a group of clones who can't decide who is the original, a pair of Siamese twins, an octopus that guides a group of orphaned thieves, and a girl named Miette (Judith Vittet) who says she can guide One to Denree.

Famed surrealist filmmakers Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro follow up their hit film Delicatessen with the visually exciting and thematically dense film The City of Lost Children. In the same way that Delicatessen was set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future, The City of Lost Children is a step further into the bizarre worlds that Jeunet and Caro envisage.

Comparable in style and atmosphere to the work of Terry Gilliam, particularly the post-apocalyptic work of Brazil and Twelve Monkeys, Jeunet and Caro also maintain the dark comic humour that has been evident in all their previous and subsequent work. It's unlikely that there is a more imaginative and deliberately eccentric film than Jeunet and Caro's The City of Lost Children.