Parky at the Pictures (DVD 1/5/2014)

As the camera alights on rooftops, window ledges and walls in order to watch the rain falling steadily on an unnamed British town, fortysomething Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is left battered, bruised and bleeding in a backalley. She is found by Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård), who offers her tea at his nearby lodging. Now in his 60s, he reveals himself to be an atheist Jewish bachelor who has devoted his life to study, while Joe confesses that she has been obsessed with satisfying her carnal cravings since the age of two. She recalls irritating her humourless mother (Connie Nielsen) by playing frogs with a friend on a wet bathroom floor. But her doctor father (Christian Slater) indulged her curiosity and taught her about trees and how the winter bared the souls.

Seligman is fascinated by Joe's insistence she is a nymphomaniac and draws an analogy between a woman's wiles and the nymph fly that is used to entice fish on to a hook. Joe props herself up in bed in his pyjamas and starts to tell Seligman about the chequered sex life that led to her assault. She entitles the first chapter `The Compleat Angler' after Izaak Walton's 17th-century manual and describes how her teenage self (Stacy Martin) and classmate B (Sophie Kennedy Clark) had a competition to see who could seduce the most men in the train toilets during a single journey. After several assignations, Joe got to claim the bag of chocolates by orally pleasuring S (Jens Albinus), a married man who was on his way home early because his wife was ovulating.

Seligman keeps interrupting with footnotes to Joe's anecdotes and raises the concept of Fibonacci numbers when she relates in `Jerôme' how she had lost her virginity at the age of 15 to Jerôme Morris (Shia LaBeouf). She had disturbed him as he was trying to fix his moped and Joe recalls how he deflowered her with three vaginal thrusts before sodomising her with five more. For a while, she belonged to a cabal of like-minded girls, whose constitution forbade them to sleep with any man more than once. However, Joe is tested when, having dropped out of medical school, she bumps into Jerôme again and, much to the annoyance of his devoted secretary, Liz (Felicity Gilbert), he hires her to work for the company owned by his uncle (Jesper Christensen).

They become lovers and Joe feels herself falling in love. But any thoughts she might have had of settling down are dashed when Jerôme marries Liz out of the blue and Joe decides to dedicate herself to sensual pleasure. Such is her lust that she has to timetable her partners to fit in as many as 10 a day. However, as she reveals in the third chapter, `Mrs H', things didn't always run smoothly. One married man, H (Hugo Speer) becomes so besotted with her that he agrees to leave his wife and move in. No sooner has he plonked his suitcases on the floor, however, than his wife (Uma Thurman) arrives with her three sons so that they can meet their father's whore and see the bed in which they fornicate. As she continues to rant, Joe's next paramour arrives and the bewildered A (Cyron Melville) finds himself in the middle of a full-blown domestic incident.

Although Mrs H set about her husband before storming out of the apartment, Joe insists the encounter made little impact upon her, as she didn't care about her admirers, as long as they satisfied her. Indeed, she suspects the only man she truly adored was her father. But, as she describes in `Delirium', he fell seriously ill and Joe sank into a depression after she witnessed him soiling himself and lapsing into a fit before he died. Making matters worse, his passing coincided with Joe losing all feeling in her genitals and no amount of pampering or punishment could help her achieve orgasm.

Volume 1 ends at this juncture, but Seligman is keen for Joe to continue, even though he is still a virgin and doesn't always understand her desires or her desperation to fulfil them. She resumes the story with Chapter Five, `The Little Organ School', in which she reunites with Jerôme after finding pieces of a torn photograph on one of her periodic long walks through the park.  They embark upon an affair and, during one date, they embarrass a waiter (Udo Kier) with a dare involving spoons. Soon afterwards, Joe moves in when she gives birth to their son, Marcel (Jacob Levin-Christensen). However, she becomes increasingly distraught by the absence of physical release and, despite being jealous, Jerôme gives her permission to seek out other suitors in the hope of regaining her equilibrium.

Following a string of meaningless encounters - including a meeting in a seedy hotel room with African siblings Kookie Ryan and Papou that descends into farce when they argue over who gets to penetrate which hole - Joe responds to an advertisement placed by K (Jamie Bell) for willing victims of brutal sado-masochism. Seligman is a bit put out and his digression on religion prompts Joe to call this chapter, `The Easternn and the Western Church (The Silent Duck)'. At first, Joe is uncomfortable with being positioned over the arm of a sofa for beatings with a riding crop. But she soon becomes so exhilarated that she even leaves Marcel unattended so as not to miss out on a whipping. Jerôme gets home to find the boy teetering on the edge of an upper balcony in the snow and admonishes Joe for her carelessness. Forced to move out, she keeps seeing K, who presents her with a cat o' nine tails for Christmas. But, even though he introduces her to the concept of the silent duck, he dismisses her when she requests intercourse.

Alone once more and denied access to her son, Joe visits a psychiatrist (Caroline Goodall), who suggests that she joins a group for sex addicts. Initially inspired by the leader (Kate Ashfield), Joe manages to go three weeks without seeking satiation. But, as she is about to testify, she catches sight of her tweenage self (Ananya Berg) sitting on the front row and recalls the day she levitated with the sheer intensity of her first orgasm. Tearing up her notes, Joe insults the other members of the group and proclaims her undying love for her vagina and the lustful things that it causes her to do before marching out to resume her wild and wicked ways.

Despite recognising her pride in her sexuality, Joe remains unhappy and smashes the looking glass in her flat in frustration. Following `The Mirror', she embarks upon the final chapter, `The Gun', which is inspired by the shape of a stain on Seligman's ceiling. Having lost her job during therapy, Joe hires herself out to L (Willem Dafoe), who compliments her on her understanding of the male psyche and teaches her how to employ it to shakedown debtors. Much to her surprise, Joe takes to the work and is particularly proud of herself when she identifies that paedophilia is the weakness of one stubbornly recalcitrant upper-class victim (Jean-Marc Barr).

Seligman is appalled when Joe admits that she fellated this fellow in pity after ruining his life. But her own downfall was soon to follow. Although he is delighted with her work, L suggests that Joe is not as young as she used to be and recommends that she grooms an accomplice. He suggests P (Mia Goth), a vulnerable girl in a children 's home, with a deformed ear and a low sense of self-esteem. Joe starts attending her basketball games and P is so grateful for the support that she begins to idolise Joe and jumps at the opportunity to move in to her spare room. Shortly afterwards, P seduces Joe and they become lovers. However, when L sends them to intimidate Jerôme (now played by Michaël Pas), Joe loses her nerve and tells P that this is her chance to prove she has what it takes to go solo.

Joe is mightily relieved when P gets home safely and their romance blossoms. But whenever P pays a call on Jerôme, she gets home late and, so, Joe decides to spy on her. She is aghast to see the pair naked through the window of Jerôme's villa and decides to use the pistol that P has procured to ambush them in the alley. However, she forgets to pull back the forend and Jerôme inflicts a savage beating before violating P in the precise manner with which he took Joe's virginity. Her protégée proceeds to urinate on her before the couple sidle away in triumph.

This is where Seligman found Joe and he speculates how different her life might have been if she had been a stud rather than a nympho and not had to battle against societal prejudice, as well as her own self-doubt. But Joe insists she has never felt either stigma or the need to fight back and is more than content with the way her life has panned out. She asks to be left alone to sleep. But Seligman sneaks back into the room and attempts to rape her and, in the darkness, Joe shoots him dead. Hurriedly grabbing her things, she flees into the night.

Frequently feeling like an EL James reworking of The Usual Suspects, this has more than its share of wry comedy. Indeed, as he strives to subvert our expectations of behaviour in the throes of an overpowering sensation or emotion, Von Trier even pulls off the odd moment of hilarity. But even at its height, Mrs H's intervention has a terrifyingly grotesque side to it, as while he never quite states that anyone could become a slave to their baser instincts, Von Trier is quick to ridicule those who consider themselves superior to Joe and her conquests.

Using sin to expose hypocrisy is hardly a novel tactic and Von Trier expands little upon ideas already presented in print by the Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin or on screen by Luis Buñuel (Belle de Jour, 1967), Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, 1975) and Catherine Breillat (Romance, 1999). Clearly there is more nudity here, but much of the coupling is simulated and seems very mild compared to the harder core material that is freely available on the Internet. There is also plenty of misogyny and a distinctly awkward joke about racial stereotypes. But Von Trier never quite takes the curse off the more objectionable material by lacing the exchanges between Gainsbourg and Skarsgård with plenty of superficially learned references to art, literature, music, religion, science and mathematics.

The majority of the performances are little more than cameos. However, Christian Slater is nicely indulgent as the nurturing father and Jamie Bell is decidedly un-Billy Elliot as the dispassionate sadist. Often forced to appear naked, Shia LaBeouf is evidently less at ease, but while nudity seems to hold no fears for the debuting Stacy Martin, she is far too inexperienced to shoulder the burden of such a pivotal and demanding role. She also looks nothing like Gainsbourg and one is left to wonder why she didn't play the part throughout. Gainsbourg is at her best when belittling Skarsgård or changing the subject when he gets uncomfortably close to exposing what may well be her imposture.

Skarsgård also does a decent job in trying to hide his arousal with protests of asexuality and a purely academic interest in his guest's exploits. But, as always, Von Trier has made himself the star of his own show, whether he is playing with split screens, captions or graphics, anticipating potential criticisms by having Skarsgård address them in loco censoris or simply pushing the envelope in his bid to scold society for being so uptight about sex. The trouble is, Von Trier is getting a bit old for inciting the chattering classes with a bit of smut and, while they make a tempting target and sex is as good a stick as any with which to beat them, there are surely better ways to highlight the agony of isolation in an increasingly impersonal world.

In his youth, Werner Herzog also enjoyed baiting critics and audiences. To some extent, he still does. But, even at his most mischievous, Herzog remains a consummate film-maker, as he proved with Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), which paid handsome tribute to FW Murnau's silent masterpiece, Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (1922). In places, Herzog faithfully recreates scenes devised by his illustrious predecessor. However, he was denied access to the city of Bremen (which had stood in for Murnau's Wismar) and was forced to shoot his exteriors in the Dutch city of Delft - although, he was refused permission to unleash thousands of rats imported from Hungary and had to relocate to nearby Schiedam to obtain his footage. The mistreatment of the rodents, both in transit and in being dyed grey to suit Herzog's aesthetic purpose, undoubtedly tarnishes the reputation of the picture. But Herzog and star Klaus Kinski chillingly recapture Murnau and Max Schreck's inspired depiction of the awful misery of being a nocturnal predator condemned to the isolation of ravenous immortality.

Land agent Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is dispatched by boss Renfield (Roland Topor) from the German town of Wismar to the Carpathian mountains to discuss properties with new client, Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski). Bidding farewell to his wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), Harker travels to Transylvania, where the villagers ply him with tales of vampirism and plead with him not to go to the castle. Abandoned by the coachman (John Leddy), Harker is greeted warmly by his host, who compliments him on Lucy's beauty on seeing her portrait amongst his belongings. Eager to become a neighbour, he quickly signs the deeds. But Harker is disconcerted by Dracula's reaction when he cuts himself with the bread knife at supper and begins experiencing strange dreams that are shared by his wife hundreds of miles away.

Left to his own devices during daylight hours, Harker explores the castle and stumbles across Dracula lying in his coffin. Now convinced that the count is a vampire, Harker makes plans to leave. But Dracula slips away in the night with a consignment of coffins filled with his native soil and Harker is detained to hospital after injuring himself in jumping from his castle confinement. While Renfield is being sectioned in an asylum after attacking a cow, Dracula makes a leisurely voyage to Wismar, systematically feasting upon the members of the crew and making it appear as though they had fallen victim to a plague. When the ghost ship finally docks, physicians including Abraham Van Helsing (Walter Ladengast) convince the harbour master (Jan Groth) and some senior civic officials (Rijk de Gooyer and Clemens Scheitz) that they have nothing to fear.

By the time the ailing Harker returns home, however, Wismar is in the grips of an epidemic that no one seems to understand. But, on encountering Dracula and being asked for a fraction of the love that she lavishes upon her husband, Lucy realises that the stranger is responsible for the spate of deaths. She tries to explain to Van Helsing and the authorities, but they are highly sceptical and she concludes that she can only rescue her fellow citizens by sacrificing herself. Luring Dracula into her chamber, she tantalises him until dawn when she surrenders to his advances and distracts him from the crowing of the rooster. Struck by the first shaft of light, the satiated vampire collapses and Van Helsing arrives to drive a stake through his heart. But Lucy fails to survive her ordeal, which is rendered meaningless when Harker awakens from his sickness, charges Van Helsing with murdering Dracula and rides off on horseback with the sky darkening in his evil wake, as a symbol of the pestilence and death he is about to unleash.

One of the recurring glories of Werner Herzog's work is his use of landscape to reflect the psychological state of his characters. Consequently, cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein emphasises the hard, cold greys of the rugged terrain around Dracula's castle (actually located in Czechoslovakia) and contrasts them with the sombre browns and reds of its interior. The seascapes on the count's circuitous odyssey from Varna to Wismar are equally forbidding and the town to which Harker returns is no longer recognisable as the picturesque place he left just weeks before. Yet, while Herzog is indebted to Schmidt-Reitwein and production designer Henning von Gierke, he owes much more to make-up artist Reiko Kruk, who not only transformed Kinksi into Schreck's doppelgänger, but also helped keep him relatively calm during a shoot whose modest budget meant that the crew was limited to just 16 people.  
Kinski, Ganz and Adjani all deliver fine performances, while Herzog makes evocative use of music by Wagner, Gounod and the avant-garde electronica combo Popol Vuh. But, rather than assessing the film in exhaustive detail, it would be better to take the unusual step of directing readers to an earlier dissertation on its making, meaning and mysteries on the MovieMail website (http://www.moviemail.com/blog/foreign-classics/1571-Werner-Herzog-s-Nosferatu-the-Vampyre-Stranger-in-a-Strange-Land/).

If the storytelling is occasionally a little self-consciously intricate in Nosferatu, it is almost capriciously convoluted in Days of Grace, the feature debut Everado Valerio Gout, an assistant director on Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), who has spent much of the intervening period directing and producing shorts in his native Mexico. Initially launched at Cannes in 2011, alongside Gerardo Naranjo's Miss Bala, this may lack that film's dramatic power or control. But it evokes the combustibility of the `heroic bloodshed' crime thrillers made in Hong Kong in the 1990s and makes such eye-catching use of aspect ratios and confined spaces that it can be forgiven the arch structural complexities linking events taking place during the World Cups of 2002, 2006 and 2010, when the already hard-pressed police force has its eye on the wrong ball.

In Mexico City in 2002, honest cop Tenoch Huerta puts the fear of God into the adolescent Kristyan Ferrer and his drug-dealing buddy by forcing them to strip at gunpoint in a bid to prevent them from becoming hardened criminals. Huerta has just become a father and dotes on wife Sonia Couoh and young son. He is equally close to partner Mario Zaragoza and is concerned when he is wounded. However, he is even more dismayed when Zaragoza ask him to deliver an envelope containing a photograph of a leading actor. When the man is kidnapped some time later, Huerta confronts his friend about his involvement with the underworld and he is advised not to get involved.

Commander José Sefami is impressed by Huerta's integrity and promotes him so he can join his crack anti-corruption unit. However, Huerta quickly learns that being a Dorado comes at a price, as when he is sent to close down a restaurant because Veronica Falcón is supposedly using it as a front for drug-smuggling and kidnapping, Huerta is informed by Falcón that he is too naive to mess with people far more ruthless than he could ever imagine. Still troubled by the actor's disappearance, Huerta asks Zaragoza about the source of the photograph and he finds himself on the tail of black marketeer Francisco Barreiro. But his reckless devotion to duty results in Couoh and their child being abducted and the distraught Huerta beats Zaragoza to death for not tipping him off that they were in danger. He also snatches Falcón in reprisal, only to discover that he has been manipulated by Sefami, who has taken over the running of the restaurant and its sidelines and the enraged Huerta guns him down in cold blood.

Four years later, businessman Carlos Bardem is bundled into a room by Ferrer and his pal Harold Torres, who are sidekicks for a mysterious boss known only as `The Teacher'. Bardem recognises that Ferrer is football mad and tries to use events in Germany to strike up a rapport. He tells Ferrer that he can arrange for them to collect a $2 million ransom and the youths agree to make the pick-up. However, Torres is killed and Ferrer informs The Teacher that he wants nothing more to do with the crime. The shadowy mastermind turns out to be Huerta, who has decided that honesty is the worst policy, and he forces Ferrer into a shootout that claims the lives of both the corrupt cop and the helpless Bardem.

As the mundial gets going in South Africa in 2010, another businessman is kidnapped and wife Dolores Heredia anxiously awaits news with their pregnant maid, Eileen Yañez. The latter has never revealed that the missing man is the father of her child. But she is more concerned that her brother Ferrer is somehow involved with the crime. Despite discovering that her husband has been unfaithful, Heredia is not prepared to sacrifice the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed. Therefore, she summons her spouse's business partner and orders him to pay the ransom, with the result that he is freed a few hours later.

Given how slender each of the storylines are, one can understand why Gout would want to fragment the action and, in the process, draw sly comparisons between the three cases. But this mosaic approach fails to address the troublesome issues with the depth of characterisation and the shifting perspectives within each vignette. There is no doubting the gravity of the situation, with figures suggesting that over 70 people a day were kidnapped in Mexico in 2012. But, in demonstrating how tangled connections become over time, Gout never allows the audience to identify entirely with a single character. Moreover, rather chauvinistically, he seems far less interested in the ménage involving Heredia and Yañez than he is in the fates of Huerta, Ferrer and Bardem. As a consequence, the 2010 episode feels tacked on and its sibling twist ties up the loose ends a tad too conveniently.

Yet, what it lacks in narrative profundity, this laudably ambitious picture more than makes up for in visual panache. Cinematographer Luis David Sansans makes dynamic use of the handheld camera technique and editors Hervé Schneid and José Salcedo sustain the momentum with their breakneck editing. But it's the switches between aspect ratios and film formats that makes this so distinctive. The tactic is legitimised by the fact that it makes the timeframes easier to identify, with the 2002 segment being shot in the 3:1 Academy ratio on 16mm stock, the 2006 sequences being filmed in standard 1.85:1 on Super 8, 16mm and 35mm, and the 2010 episodes being shot on 35mm in the widescreen 2.35:1 format. But it also impacts upon Bernardo Trujillo's sets, as the dimensions of the room in which the kidnap victims are held seem to change, even though it is actually only the furnishings that vary.

The contributions made to the score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, as well as by Atticus Ross and Shigeru Umebayashi similarly heighten the sense of delineation and disorientation. But Gout is too often intent on using this as a calling card to persuade producers with bigger budgets at their disposal that he is the man for the job. The standout shot (which has to have involved some CGI) is a 360° pan that appears to age a room eight years in a matter of seconds. But, elsewhere, the use of blurring and shakicam feels forced, while the scene in which a body part is savagely severed is a clumsy homage to Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). The performances are equally hit and miss, although it is possible from the milieu he depicts to see how Huerta could decline from being a family man and rule-book cop (who is proud of the fact that revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata had reputedly once prevented his grandmother from being raped) to become a wild hyena, who no longer sees why he is constricted by laws that have consistently let him down on a personal and a professional basis.

Yoon Sung-hyun makes an accomplished debut as writer, director and editor with Bleak Night, an intense, non-linear drama that was the 28 year-old's graduation project from the Korean Academy of Film Arts. However, the interaction between three teenagers is often as confusing as it's compelling, as Yoon seeks to add a touch of suspense to an otherwise conventional study of the national trait of militant masculinity.

Following the death of his son Lee Je-hoon, guilt-ridden father Jo Seong-ha (who was often absent during his childhood) calls on his best friends Park Jeong-min and Seo Joon-yeong to see if they could shed any light on why Lee might have taken his own life. Having already missed the funeral, Seo continues to prove elusive and Jo is surprised to learn that Park left the school some time before Lee's demise. As he picks up whatever information he can from other classmates, the action cuts back to show that Lee was something of a manipulative kingpin, who delighted in taunting the mild-mannered Park and winding up the more aggressive Seo.

The trio were pretty much inseparable, however, and spent hours playing baseball on the tracks beside a disused railway station and mooching around the marshalling yards. They even flirted with girls together and have fond memories of a trip to the coast with fellow students Lee Cho-hee and Jeong Seol-hee that saw Lee try to play matchmaker. However, things don't go smoothly after they return to the city for an all-night party and Park gets jealous when he sees Lee and Jeong chatting. However, it takes a humiliation at school and a cruel lie about Lee Cho-hee to divide the triumvirate.

Eventually, Jo catches up with Park and he tries to avoid blaming Lee Je-hoon for his decision to relocate. However, he does tell him about a final meeting after he had told Lee precisely what he thought of his scheming and Park makes a return trip to Seoul to find Seo and ask him to help Jo with his grieving. The scene shifts back to Lee telling Seo that Lee Cho-hee was a slut and the fight that follows her suicide attempt after Seo dumped her. But Yoon only hints that Lee Je-hoon died as a result of remorse and this lack of ambiguity leaves the action feeling unresolved.

Despite being too old for their roles, the leading threesome deliver sincere and persuasive performances. However, the device of Jo Seong-ha inquiring into his son's past is a little awkward, especially as he is marginalised for lengthy periods. The class bully boys (essayed by Bae Je-gi, Kim Rok-kyeong, Jeon Min-hyeon, Min Jong-gi and Heo Ji-won) are also sketchily drawn, as are girls beloved by Park and Seo. But this still marks Yoon as a film-maker of genuine talent, particularly in his use of Byeon Bong-seon's restless camerawork to establish the wintry milieu and pervading sense of unease.

The mood lightens for The King and the Mockingbird, a reworking of a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale that Studio Ghibli maestro Hayao Miyazaki rates as one of the finest animated features ever made. Started in 1948 as The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, Paul Grimault's feature boasted a scenario by Jacques Prévert, whose collaborations with Marcel Carné were pivotal to the success of the poetic realist pictures that so atmospherically captured the shifting moods of French society in the 1930s. Prévert and Grimault had been acclaimed for their 11-minute take on Andersen's The Little Soldier (1947), but the feature was taken out of their hands by producer André Sarrut, who released it under its original title and while it was still unfinished in 1952.

Fifteen years later, Grimault regained the rights to the picture and spent the next decade trying to find funding to complete it in accordance with his original vision. He finally recommenced work in 1977, the year that Prévert passed away. But The King and the Mockingbird proved worth the wait. All but 20 minutes of the original 62-minute film was recycled, but Grimault produced an extra 45 minutes to differentiate his version from Sarrut's. Just occasionally, it's possible to see the joins, most notably in the draughtsmanship of the big cats. But the graphics are often striking and the offbeat humour has lost none of its edge in the intervening 30 years. The same goes for Wojciech Kilar's score, which enhances the jollity of a story in which the ordinary people triumph over their dictatorial ruler.

The father of four baby chicks, the Mockingbird (Jean Martin) lives at the tippy-top of the palace where King Charles V + III = VIII + VIII = XVI (Pascal Mazzotti) rules the realm of Takicardia with a rod of iron. Vain, pompous and cross-eyed, he loathes his subjects and the feeling is entirely mutual, with the mockingbird detesting him more than most, as he killed his wife while out hunting. The courtiers dance attendance, however, with the mayor (Claude Piéplu) and the chief of police (Raymond Bussières) lauding Charles's efforts, even though he bungles everything he does. When he practices shooting, a soldier has to make holes in the target to make it look as though he has peppered the bullseye. But he is such a poor marksman that he cannot hit a tiny bird in a cage when standing right in front of it.

This is just as well, as the intended victim in the most accident-prone of the mockingbird's brood and he sweeps it back to his eyrie, as Charles poses for yet another portrait to hang alongside the dozens of statues that are dotted around his imposing edifice. The artist makes a great show of painting the king as he sees him and ignores the advice to flatter him with uncrossed eyes. Consequently, even though Charles congratulates him on his efforts, he sends him plummeting through one of the many trapdoors that are dotted around the palace.

Exhausted and enraged, the king and his faithful hound take an elevator to the secret apartments at the summit of the main turret. A voice (Philippe Derrez) announces the attractions on the different floors, as the lift takes an age to ascend. But Charles is only interested in the solitude he finds in his bijou quarters and he sips wine and plays a sentimental song on his gramophone as he gazes with a lovesick sigh at the shepherdess in the painting that adorns the wall opposite his bed. However, she is devoted to the chimney sweep who occupies the neighbouring frame and Charles dozes off cursing his misfortune.

Once he is asleep, the paintings come alive and, against the advice of a venerable equestrian statue (Albert Medina), the chimney sweep (Renaud Marx) beckons the shepherdess (Agnès Viala). However, the new portrait of the king (which he has touched up to give himself normal eyes) becomes equally animated and challenges the sweep to unhand his beloved. He even tips Charles through one of his own trapdoors when he wakes and objects to the commotion. But he is powerless to stop the lovers escaping up the chimney after a woman in a picture above the mantelpiece douses the fire with an amphora of water. The regal impostor pushes the bearded sage off his horse and tries to gallop after the fugitives, but they are safe on the chimney ledge looking up at the stars.

The following morning, the pair are spotted by the mockingbird's chicks and the sweep prevents the youngest from toppling off the roof when it gets caught in a cage filled with tempting berries. In his gratitude, the mockingbird tells the couple to head downwards to the Lower City, where they will be safe. The police attempt to throw a net over them from a primitive flying machine and the king is so unhappy that the chief has to hop from tile to tile in the throne room to avoid falling through the many traps. When he does slip, he is saved by his umbrella, but this is stolen by the royal pooch and the chief ends up falling in a canal when he tries to retrieve it.

Meanwhile, the sweep and the shepherdess have reached the dynastic museum, where they are recognised by the guard on duty. They manage to give him the slip, as well as a flight of sinister bat police. However, the mockingbird is captured in pointing them in the direction of the Lower City. Moreover, Charles, singularly unimpressed by the efforts to capture the runaways, has summoned a giant robot (Hubert Deschamps) that he instructs to lay waste to the community so far below the ground that its residents have never seen the sun. The lovers seek sanctuary with a blind barrel organist player (Roger Blin), but he is unable to prevent the automaton from delivering the shepherdess into Charles's clutches.

She is less than enamoured of the brass band music that emanates from a fairground organ playing behind some red curtains in the robot's chest and is devastated when the king goes back on his word to spare the sweep and the mockingbird if she promises to marry him by sending them to work in a factory that mass produces souvenirs in his likeness. The mockingbird sabotages the production line, however, and paint splatters over the portraits. They track down the barrel organ player and find him sitting in a pit full of big cats. The mockingbird tells him to play music to soothe the savage beasts and they agree to march on the throne room and prevent the nuptials.

As the animals from the zoo are cheered by the put-upon denizens of Lower City, Charles urges the mayor to get a move on with the ceremony. However, the mockingbird takes control of the robot and starts using its metal fists to smash the palace to pieces. The king tries to smuggle the shepherdess away on a staircase, but the mockingbird picks him up and casts him into oblivion so that the lovers can live happily ever after. The question is, however, where they will live, as the mockingbird has reduced the palace compound to rubble. There is reason for hope, though, as the youngest chick has managed to get himself ensnared in another cage and the robot crushes it with his gauntlet after opening the grille so it can fly away.

It's easy to see why Miyazaiki would be such an admirer of this fine film, as its combination of fable and offbeat fantasy closely resembles the Ghibli template. Indeed, this could even be called the first steampunk picture. The imagery devised by Grimault and chief animator Henri Lacam is more ingenious than beauteous, however, with the human figures often recalling those in Dave Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels (1939). But the character of the despotic monarch (who bears a number of Bourbon traits, as well as a marked similarity to Adolf Hitler when he get soaked in a pond) is superbly realised and it's a shame that the later expansion necessitated the replacement of the original voicework by Pierre Brasseur (as well as that by Anouk Aimée and Serge Reggiani as the lovers). But the lovers make less of an impression, while the garrulous mockingbird is something of an acquired taste in that Robin Williams as Genie kind of way. Nevertheless, this is a work of limitless imagination, whose wit and wisdom has a finesse that some of America's leading animators should heed and take to heart.

Finally, a much-loved book provides the inspiration for Stephan Schesch's Moon Man. However, while Irish animators Fabian Erlinghauser, Sean McCarron and Marie Thorhauge wisely stick closely to the graphic style conceived back in 1966 by Tomi Ungerer, Schesch and co-scenarist Ralph Martin overload the story in expanding upon the original text without lacing it with the satirical wit that might have appealed to older children and grown-ups.

Fed up with being alone in space, the Moon Man (Katharina Thalbach) hitches a lift on the tail of a shooting star and lands on Earth. He was hoping to make some new friends, but the President (Míchael McElhatton) is convinced he is the advance party of an alien invasion force and orders sidekick Conquista (Helen Mooney) to send his soldiers to capture him. In fact, the President is a cruel, arrogant dictator and has plans to attack the Moon and has inventor Bunsen van der Dunkel (Pat Laffan) working on a rocketship. But he doesn't care that the children can no longer sleep at night without the Moon Man's reassuring presence in the sky.

One young girl (Taylor Mooney) and her father (Paul McLoone) are concerned, however, and they cruise around in a flash car searching for the Moon Man so he can return home before the troops find him. But he is having far too nice a time to make any hasty decisions. He loves the colours and sounds of his new surroundings and even gets on well with the smaller Earthlings, after he mingles with the guests at a Halloween party. But, when he also wanders into the seafront castle of Van der Dunkel (who has been asleep for a century because he had nothing better to do), he strikes up a friendship that is far more valuable to `the Inventor of Everything' than the riches the President can offer him.

With Ungerer acting as narrator, Schesch (who also produced Hayo Freitag's 2007 adaptation of the same author's The Three Robbers) ably contrasts the worldviews of the Moon Man and the President. Having only just vanquished the last opposition to his regime, the latter detects threats everywhere, while the former sees only beauty in the flora and fauna. The sequence in which he is enchanted by a lake to the strains of Louis Armstrong's version of `Moon River' is utterly beguiling and who could resist the double act of a moose and an owl who shines a torch while perched on his antlers?

Indeed, purely on the visual front, this is one of the best advertisements for traditional 2-D graphics in a while (keep an eye out for the endless sight gags, the best of which is the presidential flag). Moreover, Schesch resists the breakneck pace and contrived set-pieces that are now as much a part of European animation as they are Pixar and Disney's high-concept romps. But the sense of peril isn't always palpable, while the underlying messages about trust, co-existence and friendship might have been stated a little more trenchantly.