Writer-director Milorad Krstic pads out what probably should have been a fascinating animated short — about an art therapist who is himself tormented by nightmares featuring characters from famous paintings — with drawn-out bits of ludicrous action. (Both the chase scene through Paris and the gunfight in a museum go on too long and feature all sorts of physical impossibilities: animation means you can do anything, but maybe it shouldn’t mean that your characters can, especially when they’re not superheroes.) The pad-outs are distracting, which is a pity, because there’s already a plenitude of weirdly implausible stuff going on, courtesy of Kristin’s surrealistic visual style, and that’s distracting enough. (Characters sport extra eyes and noses, or literally lack depth, etc.) And that stuff’s a pity because it distracts from the utterly packed tableaus, the sort that tempt you toward a second viewing just to sort out all the (literal) background information. Still, the total effect is that of a vision realized and a story told. (2019) — Matthew Lickona
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